


In Free Fall

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Depression, Drug Addiction, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Loss of Parent(s), Marriage, Non-Chronological, Parent-Child Relationship, Possible Character Death, Recreational Drug Use, Secret Marriage, Sexual Content, Single Parents, Trauma, Winner of the 2016 Profiler's Choice Awards Best Emily/Reid, Witness Protection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-20 06:34:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 54,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8239483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: There are things that Spencer Reid regrets. Hankel. The drugs. His daughter is not one of those things.
There are things that Emily Prentiss regrets. Doyle. Falling in love, sometimes. Doing anything to keep her family safe is not one of those things.
But it doesn't work. They're not safe.
They're heading for a fall, and she doesn't know how to save them.
 
   Winner of the 2016 Profiler's Choice Awards Best Emily/Reid





	1. The Stumble

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> _“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”_
> 
> **John Steinbeck** **, _The Winter of Our Discontent_**

When he’s high, she haunts him.

She’s in the pinch of the needle in his arm. The rush of the drug in his veins. The thrill of pleasure that follows; the comfortable nothing that sets in after.

_What are you looking for, Dr. Reid?_ the federally mandated shrink they’d sent him to after _the_ incident had asked him.

_Oblivion_ , Reid thinks numbly, and laughs, and smiles, and depresses the syringe. _And here it is._

When he’s high, she haunts him.

At least until he finds his oblivion, and then he thinks of nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

She falls in love with him on a grey day. It’s a grey, whiny, piece of shit day, and the weather matches her mood. They’re being run through yet another self-defence training session, and Reid is—yet again—failing anything even minutely physical. But because, despite the hilarity, Morgan’s wincing is getting on her nerves, she takes Reid aside on their lunch break and tries to teach him how to fall.

“Come on, skinny, you gotta roll out of the impact. Don’t land like a fish.”

Reid blinks up at her, doe-eyed and wheezing on the mat. “Why would you throw a fish?” he gasps, and maybe she shouldn’t have thrown him _quite_ so hard. “Your analogies are illogical.”

“You’re illogical,” she counters, bending down to help him up. His hands are wide on hers, warm and bony, and she thrills like she always does when he touches her. It’s rare, his touch. Rare and exciting and, damnit, it’s just because he’s attractive underneath the dork, that’s absolutely it. Absolutely. “And you’re going to lose your field agent status if they think you can’t protect yourself when disarmed, genius.”

He blinks. Smiles. The smile is shy and downward-cast and, if she didn’t know him better, she’d call it flirting. It _is_ flirting. The pad of his thumb skates over her palm. She’s hot and itchy and a little bit silly all at once, blaming the weather for all of those things.

“Well, lucky I have a gun,” he says, brushing down his pants.

“A gun you can’t shoot.” He’s standing too close. Too close and too warm and he smells like _Reid_. She wants to tuck her nose against his neck and see if she can work out the intricacies of that scent. “I’m thinking of taking you outta the field myself. I’d…” The amusement vanishes. Too close. Physically, and everything else. Too close, too young, too much. “…hate to see you hurt.”

He steps closer. Their shoulders brush. His breath is warm and coffee-sour. “Luckily, I have a team to watch my back,” he adds, picking a blade of grass from her shirt. “My trust in you is implicit.”

Later that day, he lands faultlessly and then performs probably the only perfect takedown he’s managed since he was a goofy-eyed spit of a thing at the academy. She’s oddly proud, and more than a little turned on.

It’s three months before Hankel and she falls in love with him that day.

She’ll remember that later.

 

* * *

 

He’s contemptable, and she knows it. He can feel it in her touch, her eyes, her scornful gaze.

_What’s wrong with you_? she mouths at him when he lets the mask slip on a case, and he just grins and deflects and hides how foul he really is. When he turns away, his shoulder bag bumps accusingly against his pelvic bone and he hears the ghost of a _clink_.

_Don’t forget me,_ whisper his weaknesses. He wonders where it all went wrong. Remembers a grey day and blue mats and learning how to fall.

He’s falling now; there’s no escaping the impact.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t supposed to be a date. They’d gone to a movie, their usual thing, but the power had gone out halfway through. Reid had started rattling off a list of famous power outages, complete with reasons and time-frames. To shut him up, she’d taken him to an all-night ice-creamery that she’d known would let him try as many flavours as he wanted if she smiled in just the right way.

And she’s sitting here now; he has sherbet on his chin and it hits her that they’re cheerfully debating the merits—or lack thereof—of Morgan’s taste in music while wearing their nicest clothes. Nice clothes in a dinky little diner with red pleather chairs that squeak and tables that Reid had winced at until she’d asked for a cloth to wipe them down. This is a _date_.

It’s a date from an eighties coming-of-age movie, and she’s frozen with that knowledge.

“Em?” he asks with the smile that’s just the right centre between ridiculous and intense, and she can’t find her words to reply. Just watches his fingers shredding the thin paper napkins, showering a snowstorm of white onto the oddly textured tabletop. His ice cream is melting in its bowl. It’s a disgusting mix of every flavour and at least eighty percent sugar. To cover her panic, she reaches out and swipes her finger across the lip of the bowl, tasting it.

It tastes like sugar and blue, and she pulls a face. “Gross,” she grumbles, reaching for a napkin, and he’s laughing at her. “Your diet is disgraceful.”

The expression he pulls isn’t quite a pout but it could _almost_ be one, and she scowls at it. “It is not,” he protests, dipping his own finger into the sugary gloop and tasting it with no compunction for germs or for how dry her mouth goes watching his tongue flick over his bony knuckle. “I can cook.”

There’s two choices here. Brush that comment off, tease him a little. Things stay the same. On solid ground.

Or she can call his bluff. _Prove it,_ she’ll say, smiling in the way that gets the attention of the people she intends it to, and he will. He’ll take her back to his compact little apartment, cook a meal that he’ll probably be fucking fantastic at, she’ll finally offer to wipe that tiny smear of sherbet from the jaw that’s only faintly promising scruff, and they’ll fall. Fall together. The sex will be fine, he’ll kiss her like he wants to learn every part of her, and she won’t be able to think of his hands in the same way again.

The spoon in his hand scrapes against the bowl. In the corner of the diner, a girl is chattering into her cell. Two men sit too close together and try to pretend no one has noticed. The waitress is bored. It’s late. Emily feels reckless.

“Prove it,” she whispers, and he does.

 

* * *

 

She comes to his apartment one night and he turns her away. He can’t do this to her. Can’t drag her into the spiralling catastrophe that’s become his life. If he does, she’ll drown in it.

“Let me in,” she snaps through the closed door. He’s barely buzzed and thinking longingly of oblivion. There’s blood on the crook of his arm from where he’s itched the red rash of bumps scarring his skin and, when he pokes at it, the skin is sluggish. _Dehydrated, probably_ , he thinks, and holds back a laugh that she’ll hear. _Deal with that. If you let your health slip, they’ll notice._

_Of course they’ve noticed. They’re profilers._

_They just don’t **care**._

The door smacks painfully into his foot when he yanks it open, and he knows the dim lighting hides his shame. Doesn’t let her get a good look at him just the same. “Why won’t you leave me alone?” he snarls, channelling all his pain into this moment. Making her hurt like he’s been hurt. Making her go _away_ and let him go. “Why are you here?”

Her mouth is set in a mulish line, her jaw stubborn, and he wants to kiss that stubbornness away, feel her melt and become pliable under his hands and his lips. Wants and wants and wants, but not as much as he just wants to be high. “You need help,” she says, and it’s true, really, but not for the reasons she thinks he does.

“Why do you think you know me so well?” he says, instead of all of this. “We’ve been working together, what, a few months? What gives you the right? Because we _fucked_ , Emily? Is that it? I didn’t realize casual sexual relationships gave you the right to my life.”

She’s reeling, stunned. He digs the knife in deeper.

“You’re seeing more where there isn’t anything,” he says, and smiles cruelly. A bladed smile. A mocking smile. The kind people give children when they’re being particularly obtuse. “ _I_ need help? I’m not the one clinging desperately to the slightest hint of affection. Want me to profile you? Desperate to succeed, abandonment issues, commitment—”

“Fuck you.” She hates him. He can hear it. It sends a cold thrill of triumph and horror up his spine, something miserable and weak inside him curling up small and dying just a little. “Fuck _you_ , Spencer Reid.”

He laughs. “I don’t think so. I try not to repeat my mistakes.” It works. She leaves. This time, he makes sure he’s high enough she can’t slip into his thoughts.

No matter how much she tries.

 

* * *

 

It’s not just sex.

She wishes it was.

Reid fucks like he does everything else: with a careful, loving passion that takes her apart again and again and again and doesn’t let her catch her breath. It’s their first time, probably their only time, and she’s been with so many men before, but never like this. Never so _loved_. There’s a way he touches her that says without words that she’s cherished, adored, and she thinks privately that he might touch every woman he’s with like this. She seriously doubts Spencer Reid has ever invited someone into his bed he doesn’t love, even just a little.

But it’s the kind of sex that’s impossible to put aside, impossible to forget. The kind that slips back into her mind in the early hours of the morning; not when she’s feeling horny and empty, but when she’s feeling bereft, alone, thinking of something _more_. The something that leads to Sunday morning pancakes and three a.m. trips to the ice-creamery and all the kinds of things that she’d normally run a mile away from.

She hates him, a little, for doing this to her.

It starts in the kitchen, just like she’d thought it would. He cooks. He’s great at it. “It’s just chemistry,” he says, and invites her to taste the sauce. This is where it went off script. She doesn’t initiate. He does. Him with his wide, steady hands and his clever, clever mouth. She’s trapped from the first touch of his lips. Trapped as he lifts her onto the counter, her legs around his waist. Trapped as his hands slip under her shirt to rest around her sides, holding her firm. Protectively. Trapped as he kisses her mouth and her jaw and, once, with painful care, the lines around her eyes that show when she smiles. She smiles a lot this night.

He takes her to the bedroom, eventually, and continues undoing her with every sweep of his hands. The surface of his glasses misting with the heat from her body as he explores her with his mouth, he’s intense and focused and she feels like a case, a puzzle he needs to solve.

She tries to turn it into a joke to stave off the panic it brings. “Jeez, Spence. Anyone would think you’re in love with me, the care that you’re taking. I’m not going to break.”

He blinks at her through the thick lenses, his eyes dark and hazy, and doesn’t say a word as he pushes slowly inside her, those eyes flickering shut.

She was wrong.

There’s nothing fine about this. She’s falling, and it’s thrilling.

 

* * *

 

“I’m concerned, Reid.” Hotch isn’t sitting like he normally does on the rare occasions Reid is called into his office. He’s straight backed and serious faced, and he stresses the _I’m_ to hide the fact that it wasn’t him who’d voiced those concerns.

“You mean Agent Prentiss is concerned,” Reid says flatly, noting his slip up a moment too late. _Agent Prentiss_. Not Emily or Em or even just Prentiss. He may as well slap on a glowing sign that says, _I have an addictive personality and this is the only way I know how to protect her from that._

“ _We_ are all concerned,” Hotch says mildly, and slips on a caring mask. A concerned mask. A _lying_ mask. Reid feels his leg begin jittering against the floor, his arm itching, his fingers digging through the fabric of his pants. Micro-expressions he can’t control. Tics. His behaviour betraying him. His team betraying him. “We’re worried that after Hankel—”

Reid stands. “Am I receiving a formal warning?” he asks. Blunt.

“No, but—”

“Is this meeting mandatory?”

“Reid—”

“Has my conduct been unprofessional or hindered our work in any fashion?” Reid controls his breathing, slows his chest from heaving. Stops the quiver in his legs. Hides his hands behind his back. Stares his boss down in a way the old Reid never would have. _Too bad_ , he thinks savagely, _that that Reid never left Hankel’s shack. You wouldn’t have let **him** drown._

Hotch stands too. Alpha male can’t handle a direct threat to his command. _Posturing._ “No, your conduct is adequate,” he responds, his voice sharp. “Reid, sit—”

“Then, I’m leaving. Sir.” Reid adds the last to soften the blow and doesn’t look back.

 

* * *

 

Hankel takes him from them and they drag him back. Emily has nightmares after those horrifying three days. Nightmares of Reid leaning over a half-dug grave with his expression hungry and her being a second too slow to yank him back. Nightmares of the gun going off, painting a picture of brain matter and broken skin. Nightmares of a chair and a graveyard and an empty seat on the jet. Nightmares of the moment he’d seized and fallen still. She can’t bear that. Can’t bear imagining it. It breaks her to do so.

She can’t even cling to him, despite this tentative thing that’s still three months going strong, because he’s shaken and sick and something of him had shattered a little in that shack. She has to be the strong one, and she is, at first. They release him from the hospital and she’s there when she can be. Makes sure he’s eating. Makes sure he’s taking his medication. Makes sure he’s not drowning in boredom. Tries not to notice that he never turns the lights off anymore and that, if she throws a careless arm over him in her sleep, she’ll wake up to him silent and shaking and staring blankly at the ceiling. He kicks the covers off in the night, sleeps with his back to the wall, and they’re all pretending not to notice the cracks.

But she can’t judge him, because she was worse. After Doyle. After everything.

She was worse.

She can’t even tell him that. Doesn’t know if it would help him if she did.

Cases take her away. When she comes back, he’s always a little more distant, a little _less_. This doesn’t get better.

 

* * *

 

He’s out. He’s out, there’s no dealer available short-notice who’ll sell to a fed, and he’s not so careless that he’ll go walking the streets to find what he needs. It’s not even not having the drug that’s tearing at him. It’s been months. Months since her. Months since he’d chased her away with his words and his bladed smiles, and he’s alone now, like he deserves, and sorry for it. Pitying himself. _Pathetic._

There are other options. Other options for the oblivion he needs to stop her haunting him. Other options to pretend that she’d never gone away at all. Different drugs, different women. In one of them, surely, he’ll find some semblance of what he needs.

_Just this one time,_ he promises himself, and dresses with care. He’s back at work, so he has to be cautious. Nothing that will linger into the workweek. His face is scruffy, two days unshaven, and he likes that because it makes him less Spencer and more whoever he is now. _Just this one time so my appearance doesn’t deteriorate. So they don’t notice._

_Rationalizing,_ another part of him whispers, and he shoves it carelessly away.

The club is loud, the music reverberating through his bones and his flesh and the jitter to his hands. The floor is sticky under his shoes. There’s a drink in his hands he doesn’t remember ordering, the flashing lights are making his head throb along with the bass, and he finds what he needs. Takes what he needs. Just for tonight. This one time.

The rush is old and new all at once and he’s alive with it.

 

* * *

 

It’s a terrible idea to be dragged along to a club that Derek freaking Morgan of all people picks. He always finds the seediest ones: the ones with the grossest bars and the most over-priced drinks and the ever-present worry that their night out is going to end in a drugs bust or a brawl. Morgan seems to thrive on it. She doesn’t mind, not really, but normally by this time of the night Morgan’s slipped away with his choice of lady and she’s found someone else to keep her occupied. Failing that, she dances alone. She’s rarely _bored_.

Tonight, she’s bored. She’s edgy. She’s preoccupied with work, with Reid’s blank eyes, with Hotch’s quiet worry and Gideon’s fatalistic assertion that it will all magically fix itself in the end. The bar under her fingers is waxy. She drums along with the music and scans the crowd. Profiling people just for fun. She’s on the drunker side of almost fucked up and should probably stop, but she’s waiting for things to get _fun_. The girl with the blonde hair and the purple high-tops is here to get back at her boyfriend, that boy is gay and hiding it, the man over there has children and wants to be anywhere but here, the couple against the wall are—

Familiar.

The rush leaves her giddy. She blinks, squints. Can’t be sure she’s seen what she’s seen but the man has his back to her and she _knows_ that back. Knows the shape of it, the slightly-hunched body language as though the man behind the aggressively shitty posture is trying to be less than what he is. The hair that’s a shade too long and always messy. Even the long-sleeved shirts he’s taken to wearing. She knows the one she’s looking at right now. It’s hard to tell under the blue of the strobing lights, but she’s sure it’s the one she’d splashed coffee on last week when he’d slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a duck.

The rush is followed by cold. He’s pressed against a girl wearing a shirt that shows too much tit and too much belly, and that’s not his type. Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe it’s not him.

The walk over there is long, growing longer. She taps his shoulder as the girl looks at her oddly, young and wide-eyed and so fucking precious Emily could vomit.

It _is_ him. He turns and stares at her like she’s a ghost. Like he’s unsure.

The music is too loud to talk, so she throws her hands up in a _what the fucking fuck_ gesture and he cocks his head and examines her slowly. Smiles to see her. It’s a soft smile and she relaxes a little. It’s a smile she hasn’t seen in a while and it makes her reckless. The girl complains, but Emily rolls her eyes at her—she’s just so _young_ , and she doesn’t really think at the time that they’re probably the same age because Reid stopped looking young months ago—and grabs Reid’s arm. Dragging him away. Attempting to. The ground is a little wobbly and she wobbles with it.

He catches her. _Of course he did_ , she thinks, and feels herself leaning gratefully into that firm embrace. Like they’ve stepped back in time. He’s himself again, holding her like she’s precious, and she remembers a grey day and falling in love. But they need to talk. There’s a corridor leaning away, _Staff Only_ , but fuck it. It’s quiet, secluded, and there’s a bathroom with a lock on it that she can drag him into and find out what the hell he’s doing here, out of his element.

That’s the plan. That’s not what happens. What happens is this:

She closes and locks the door, turns to face him, and their mouths crash together. He kisses her ravenously, possessively, almost violently, and she’s fucking _gone_. Their teeth clack, her ass and back hit the door, and his hands are roaming every part of her and not pausing to take anything in. It’s fast, crazy, reckless, and she’s fucking gagging for it before he’s even thought it though.

His hips bump her thigh. He’s hard already, gasping into her mouth until he slips his way across to her ear, tracing the lobe with a hungry tongue. Back to her mouth as his hands hike up the dress she’d second-guessed wearing tonight, fingers between her legs in a heartbeat, slipping inside her underwear, slipping inside _her_. There’s no compunction or pause before she’s suddenly being roughly fucked by his fingers in the gleaming staff bathroom of a seedy club. It’s not like him. It’s not like him at all, but his eyes are hooded prettily and shuttered shut, and when she moans and bucks onto those fingers, he bites down hard enough on her lip to draw blood. She tastes copper and she tastes him, and he licks her lip once quickly, pulling his hand free and bringing it to his mouth.

Jesus. _Jesus._

If she wasn’t gone before he’d pressed those slick fingers to his lips, she fucking is now. Hands on his pants, on his zip, and before she can think twice he’s bare and heavy in her hands and she’s guiding him between her legs. “Wait,” he says, fumbling in his pocket with fingers that are suddenly clumsy. It’s the first time he’s spoken and his words aren’t as sharp as usual, hazed with alcohol and lust. “Condom.”

He’s taking too long. Taking too long and she wants and she wants and growls with frustration. “I trust you,” she mutters, letting her head slip forward, dizzy and needy, and he shakes his head and ignores her recklessness. _Lucky one of us is sensible_ , she thinks giddily, closing her eyes as the foil packet appears between his fingers like a magic trick.

When it comes, her eyes are still closed and it’s a thrilling shock. He thrusts home with a throaty grunt and without a pause, lifting her and slamming her back against the door in his haste. It’s sudden, good, and she lets her head tilt back to smack against the door as well with a croaked moan. And again, as he pulls back in a long, smooth stroke that ends in a vehement thrust forward, finding his rhythm and tapping it against the door with her body in a way that makes her glad for their seclusion.

It’s not like him, not at all, but she doesn’t really care because it’s edgy and angry and feels rather like what she’d expect when she remembers the venom in his voice aimed at her. There are demons between them, in the stroke of his hip and the scratch of her nails on his skin, and she won’t bring them to life by naming them just yet.

She’s on the bare edge of coming just from the tension of it when he shudders and slumps against her, his rhythm becoming erratic and tense until finally, finally, skipping two beats as he pulses inside of her. It’s primal, this sex, so she’s shocked when his lips brush her shoulder and he chokes out an audible, _Emily_ , that sounds hurt and shaken and so fucking tender that she immediately aches with it. It’s followed by a groan that’s more of a whimper, and she’s knocked off whatever edge she was dancing on, suddenly cold and sober and vividly aware that she’s missed something vital. He pulls out. Stumbles away. And that’s not right. He’s _never_ come first, never left her hanging, and his head is low, his hands uncertain.

“Hey.” Her voice is soft. Soothing. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Her fingers catch his arm, try to catch him, but he jerks free.

“Don’t.” And it’s back, the coldness. Like a slap in the face, he looks up and at her like she’s a stranger. She feels sick. “Don’t touch me like that. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t…”

It’s the repetition that gives it away.

Emily blinks. Peers closer. “Spencer,” she begins, and his gaze snaps up again from where it’s drifted down.

“What?” he croaks. She winces at the dryness of his throat. “I never told you my name.” His eyes are huge, his body shaking, and she’s going to be sick. It suddenly slams home, all of it. Everything that hadn’t made sense. Everything that now makes sense.

“You’re fucked up,” she says, and steps closer. He backs away until he hits the wall and she wants to grab him and slap him and hug him and do his fucking pants up so he stops looking so obscenely lost, but instead she just grabs his chin hard enough to bruise and stares into those eyes, at the pinpoint pupils that see everything and nothing. “Oh, what the _fuck_ have you done? What did you take? How _much_ did you take?”

He blinks. Once. Again. Mouth slipping open. “Emily?” he slurs, and his eyes are shuttering closed again. He sags in her arms, sinking to the ground, and she shoves away everything that this moment could have been and makes sure he lands safely. “Don’t. Don’t tell Emily…”

She knows what to do. Does it on autopilot.

Check pulse.

Check airway.

Call for help.

She calls Morgan. She doesn’t think about the man in front of her as Reid or Spencer or anything that will make this more than what it is; it’s just her helping someone in need of assistance, not a friend or a lover or a co-worker or anyone that she could hurt to lose tonight. She just does it on autopilot and, later, the horror of this night will sink in. Sink in and not let her go.

He’s high, and she’s haunted by it.


	2. The Fall

“How are you today, Dr. Reid?”

Reid closes his hand over the polished wood of the armchair. Knocks his nails against it twice. Folds his fingers in towards his palm, dragging his knuckles across the shiny wood surface. Focuses.

“I saw you had a visitor this week. A friend?”

Reid blinks, and finally looks up. “I don’t know,” he says honestly, and hunches back into the chair. “I… don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

Reid slips from awake to insensible without warning and she’s alone. Alone and, now that she’s crouched by his side, horribly aware that she’s not in the state to deal with this; the ground is pitching and her gut is twisting. Morgan’s coming, she’s managed that much. Her hand settles on his shoulder and he twitches grossly. Opens his eyes to look up at her. Now she’s aware, it’s horribly obvious. His movements are sluggish, stilted, and his body is stiller than she’s ever seen it. Reid is usually movement and jittering and way too much caffeine but, right now, he’s motionless and ruined.

She feels sick again. Staggers up. Rinses her mouth out in the shining basin, wets some paper towel, and does what she can to try and hide what they’ve done, to give Reid some semblance of his pride back. His hands, her legs, pausing over his arms and the marks she’d never seen before now. Finally, she settles the cool paper against his forehead to offer some small comfort. She feels gross doing it, but more towel comes in handy to clean up the mess they’ve made of his crotch, hiding the discarded condom in a wadded-up ball of paper and tucking him away. It's never something she’d have imagined doing for a friend, a lover, whatever he was or is and probably isn’t anymore.

The door rattles and opens. Morgan strides in, looking strained. His eyes settle on Emily first, taking in her flushed face, the state of her dress, the expression that she knows is a slip away from panic. Then they skip to Reid.

“Oh Jesus, what the fuck did you two _do_?” he asks, shutting the door, and she’d think _that_ was fucking obvious. “How drunk is he? How drunk are _you_?”

“He’s high,” she says, and then, horrifyingly, feels her eyes begin to burn. The admission costs her everything. “I don’t know how to help him.”

Morgan says very little after that. There’s horror and anger radiating from him as he kneels next to them, tilting Reid’s chin up, fingers brushing across his throat. “He’s not OD’ing,” he says finally, his voice icy. “Just off his face.”

Emily looks away, swallowing down something thick and painful, skimming her fingertips across her cheek to come away damp. A hand catches hers, brushing her jaw, resting against her hand.

Reid. His eyes are on her. “I couldn’t stop loving you,” he mumbles, voice heavy, and her heart drops into her shoes. She looks at Morgan right as his face crumples, misery and horror folding itself into every line as he stares at her like she’s the reason their friend is shattered. “I tried. I’m sorry. I’m sorry… sorry…”

And he’s gone again.

She closes her eyes and lets Morgan take over.

 

* * *

 

“You’re going to have to start talking to me eventually. You’ve been here long enough now, Doctor, you know how we work. We need your cooperation.”

Reid tucks his knees against his chest and studies his psychiatrist through his overlong bangs. She’s genuinely intent on him, dedicated to her job, and not for one second intimidated by his intelligence. He’d tried that the first day he’d met her, still wired and withdrawing and cruel with the mix of them. She’d just smiled and waited for him to finish trying to hurt her with her flaws.

He’s sorry for that now. Sorry for a lot of things.

“I am cooperating,” he says instead of sorry, and digs his chin into his kneecap, feeling tired, always tired, and not much else. It’s not what she wants, and he knows it. “I’ve surpassed all expectations for treatment.”

“For the addiction,” she counters. He sucks in air between his teeth and stares out the window over her shoulder, at the rain on the glass. “You’ve exhibited considerable depressive symptoms in the nine weeks you’ve been with us, Spencer. We’re concerned that you’re not seeking treatment for those. Every time I try, you divert the conversation.”

Spencer. A first name. She’s trying to connect with him.

He closes his eyes. “It’s Christmas next week,” he mumbles into his pants. “Are you visiting family?”

He’s fine. He’s doing… fine.

 

* * *

 

Morgan simmers in the taxi. Emily is silent. It’s hot, crammed in the backseat with Reid slumped between them, and she feels sweaty and anxious and uncomfortably tacky. Keeping her arm around his slim shoulders, his head against her chest and his damp breath warm on her skin, she doesn’t let the driver get a look into his eyes.

“Your friend, he okay?” the driver asks once, glancing at them in the rear-view mirror. Emily tightens her arm. Reid mumbles something, fighting her grip for a second, his lashes brushing her collarbone. She feels sick because the words he whispers almost sound like, _I don’t want it,_ and she doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“For now,” Morgan says ominously. Emily gulps hard and tries not to remember the fury in his eyes when he’d found them. Instead, she presses her mouth against Reid’s sticky hair, curls her fingers around his hand, and wonders if he’ll remember any of this in the morning.

 

* * *

 

“You’ve been improving amazingly. Clearly you have something you want to recover for. Why don’t you tell me about that?”

The group shifts awkwardly, all eyes skipping away from the woman they’d singled out today. Reid dislikes this part. They have to volunteer at the beginning to be called upon during group therapy, and it’s not something he’s even been faintly tempted by before. This woman looks like she regrets it.

But she juts her chin out, stares them all down anyway, and says finally, “My family.”

Reid lifts his head. The words slip out before he can stop them, his voice harsh and unfamiliar. He’s never spoken here before.

“Me too.”

 

* * *

 

She sleeps on the couch at Morgan’s. Despite the anger and the betrayal she knows he’s simmering, Morgan puts Reid in the bed. Despite all of that, he stays with him.

She gets up once and pads into the room to check. The lights are on. Reid is on the side closest to her, propped into the recovery position and arm limp over the side of the bed. Fully dressed still, except for his shoes, and he looks faded and indistinct against the bedcovers. Morgan is reclined next to him, a book open in his hands and his eyes locked on the lethargic rise and fall of Reid’s chest.

“We should have taken him to the hospital,” he says suddenly, and he doesn’t sound angry now, just sad.

“It would be the end of his career.” They couldn’t do that to him. There’s a way out of this moment. There’s a way to drag him back from the brink. From dancing on the edge of his grave, greedily looking inward. “And that would be the end of him.”

Morgan lowers the book and stares at her. “Maybe it needs to be ended,” he says. He’s by-the-book, Derek Morgan is. He follows rules because he believes in the rightness of them, in the absolute need to do things correctly. He’s a rougher Hotch, ten years younger, and she knows the bitter argument they’d had in the club about what to do next will sit between them for months to come. “You really want him having your back like this? Having my back? What about JJ, huh? You wanna send her into the field with Reid when he’s high or desperate for a hit?”

“He’s never high at work.” But she doesn’t know that. None of them know that. He very well could have been; it doesn’t seem like him but, shit, a smack addiction hadn’t seemed like him either and they’ve got a rash of barely healed track-marks on his arm and a tender broken point on her lip to prove how wrong they were about that.

“Why are you defending him so vehemently?” Morgan’s voice is loud, getting louder, and she sees Reid’s eyes flicker open. He stares at her. They’re clear, the pupils normal. “Don’t think I don’t know what you two were doing in there, Prentiss. What were you _thinking_? His behaviour recently, his behaviour tonight—you can’t tell me he was this trashed and acting normally. You can’t tell me you didn’t _suspect_. Why’d you do it?”

Reid blinks slowly, flicking his tongue over his dry lips. Still watching her.

“I know what it’s like to fall,” she says, and thinks again of Doyle.

 

* * *

 

“Tell me about Emily,” she says, and Reid panics. Breath hitching, sticking, choking in his chest. He can’t think about Emily and her eyes and her hatred of him without feeling like he’s drowning. He curls up tighter, physically and otherwise, wincing as she raises an eyebrow and notes something down on the pad that she never lets him get a single glance at. He can’t think about Emily but he has to, because to not is to admit the hold that Emily still has over him. The hold she’ll always have over him now because of how he’s hurt her. How he’s taken her and sullied her with his touch and his monumental fucking-up, and how she’ll never be the same. There’s no atonement for what he’s done.

“I hurt her,” he says finally, and drops his feet to the floor, straightening in the chair. _I hurt her._ He had. Taken her like she was nothing to him, nothing but a body. He’d seen the bruises, the mark on her lip, and known what he’d done while trying to satisfy two cravings. _Why’d you do it?_ “When I was high.”

There’s a pause. “Physically?” she asks, with a frown hidden behind her non-judgemental demeanour, and he knows it’s because he was admitted with a firm tick next to the box labelled _non-violent_.

And he nods.

 

* * *

 

They’re back at work and no one is talking. Reid is being Reid with a care that’s almost painful. He’s trying to be the Reid that never knew what it felt like to die on the dusty floor of a poacher’s shack, but she looks at him and can see he’s still post-Hankel but just trying to hide all his new edges. He’s smiling too much and too wide and his desperation to be normal is palpable.

He’s terrifying everyone.

Morgan is silent and furious, and she knows something is going to happen there. Hotch can see the cracks between them: the way she sits between Reid and Morgan like she’s the only thing stopping them from reacting off one another and the way Reid’s refusing to meet his friend’s eyes. There’s still a scab on her lip, a black patch on pink, and she knows Hotch can see that as well. There are bruises too, not just on her, and she’s glad for the unseasonably brisk weather that lets them both hike their collars up.

The case they’re on is bloody enough that she knows what colour her dreams will be for the near future. Reid is a force of nature that tears through the profile like it’s the only way he can make up for all his mistakes. Even JJ is put back by how focused and determined he is, a line of worry creasing between her eyes.

“Maybe you should lay off the coffee, Spence,” she says, brushing her hand against his elbow, and he jerks away and swallows hard. It’s a concentrated swallow, purposeful, and she can see the nausea slide over his skin and leave it clammy as he chokes whatever’s inside him back down.

“Probably,” he says, nodding his head. His hair is long and unkempt, but it doesn’t shift with the movement, glued to his skin by perspiration. “Hah. Yeah. Bathroom…”

And he vanishes, moving quickly in an awkward shuffle of legs with one arm crooked almost over his belly. JJ’s face falls. They all know that look.

Emily follows.

Knuckles white around the polished rim of the toilet bowl, he’s buckled, bent, spine snapping forward as he lurches and the merry sound of the contents of his stomach emptying fills the room. He hasn’t seemed to notice her, breathing sloppily through his mouth with his chest heaving, so she steps quietly to the sink and wets more paper towel. It falls apart in her hands under the weak trickle of the tap. She thinks numbly how fragile it’s all turned out to be. All she can smell is vomit, sweat: the acidic mix of one man’s misery and his failure to ask for help.

When she touches his back, he jolts and the jolt becomes a tremor that becomes another convulsive heave. Paper towel to his cheek, his forehead; one of his hands slips on the side of the bowl and she catches it, thanking the lock on the bathroom door he’d forgotten but she hadn’t, gripping that hand tightly as he rides the waves of his illness.

And then it’s over and he’s silent, spent, his breathing choked and almost sobbing. She knows that feeling. Knows it from being a kid and frightened of the way her body was turning against her. Knows it from being an adult and cursing the lure of the night before.

“Em,” he says, a bite in his voice she knows not to take personally, it’s just the shame of her seeing this, but whatever he says after it is lost as he dry heaves violently, one last time. The sound rips from him and she shudders along. It’s an excruciating sound and ends in a whine of misery as his head lolls forward and she catches it with the hand not currently noting how weak his grip is. “I can’t. I can’t do this. I’m not—”

She shuts him up by dragging him against her, tapping the flush button before hugging him close. He’s a damp, heavy, _miserable_ weight and she wants to cry with him as he shakes against her, coming apart. Finishes the fall that began two days ago in another bathroom and ends here with his knees against hers and his face dampening her chest. They’re not tears of misery or grief, and that hurts. They’re tears of need, of want, and she knows he’s not thinking of her at all.

“You can,” she replies quietly. He stiffens, going rigid and awkward in her grasp. Dragging his hand from hers, he tugs her shirt collar to the side, ignoring her growl, and stares at the mark he’d left there. She doesn’t make a quip or a joke about it because he looks pole-axed and scared. The hand finds hers again, turning it over with clammy fingers, hazel eyes studying the faint hint of a bruise on her wrist where he’d pressed it back against the wall. “Spence. Seriously. You can, but you don’t need to do it alone… there are places that can…”

But when she reaches for him again, he scoots away and stands, his expression closed. He’s sweaty and tinged green and white, his glazed eyes staring straight through her. He can’t go out there like this, not in a PD full of cops who know withdrawal when they see it.

“I have to go back to the hotel,” he murmurs, looking anywhere but the disgusting fucking tiles she’s kneeling on still, and gestures to splatters of ick on his shirt. “I’ll call Hotch from the car.”

Then he’s gone, and she knows in more ways than one.

 

* * *

 

What will you do when you get out of here?”

The question is loaded. Dangerous. It slinks into his brain and makes him question all the things he’s been ignoring for the past nine weeks, reminding him that there’s an outside, a something else, and problems he has to face. Things he’s done.

So, he takes a shuddering breath, and he answers this one. This loaded question. There’ll be more in the future, because this place, this white-washed bleached-clean hostel from the shattered life of Spencer Reid… it’s just a temporary retreat.

“Be a father.”

 

* * *

 

She should have fucking known.

Life, she decides, hates her. Hates her, hates Reid, hates their team, hates everything they are and every iota of happiness they try to claw from it. Every time they inch their way towards something better, it throws them back down and strikes them for daring to look anywhere but at the ground.

She doesn’t tell Reid because she’s fucked up about this. More fucked up than she knows how to admit. She’s panicking, breaking, crumbling, and she knows he’s relapsed three times over in the five weeks since the club. Knows, because she’s been there for two of those times, wiping sweat from his skin and vomit from his mouth. But he’s fucking trying and she knows he’s going to keep failing, and she knows somethings going to give because they’re all strained to the limit. Rubber bands about to snap under the pressure of being dragged in every direction, and she can’t add another pulling pressure to Reid or he’ll spring apart and knock them all down with his paralysing momentum.

So, she’s alone and she’s hurting and she’s fucked, so fucked, and this is how he finds her. Alone, except not really.

Fucked, and that’s a given.

Hurting, and it’s her turn to be almost kissing the cold porcelain with her chin as she pukes her guts up and then some. It’s his turn to be the hands holding the paper towel, and she’s savagely pleased to see that it falls apart just as helplessly under his magician’s fingers; his turn to hold her hand; his turn to watch her sniff and choke through nausea with his eyes smudged black-bruises in the ghastly white mask of his waxy skin. Later, she’ll blame the vomiting; being sick always makes her weepy. She’ll blame the hormones, the fear, anything but the truth. The truth that makes her snarl and spit in his arms like a cat in a trap.

“I want him back,” she chokes. The words squeeze out between clenched teeth and they’ve never been truer. “Fuck you, Reid, I want my best friend back.” She’s screaming at an addict for falling to his addiction, and it’s cruel and useless and violently real. “I want the man who eats double choc whatevers for breakfast. I want my friend and my co-worker and the man I fucking fell in love with and I want him back _now_ because I need him you bastard, I need him, I need—” And she’s crying, real fucking tears, and he’s staring at her blankly. “I loved you. Still love you. Help me. Please.”

_Stop being sick,_ she wants to keep ranting. _Stop being hurt. Be strong and steady and work through this with me._

“Should I get JJ?” is all the alien in the body of Spencer Reid says, and she slaps him. Weakly. There’s no anger or spite in the move, but it works. It works and she hates herself for it. He blinks, reels, and his eyes narrow. “Emily, what the hell?!”

“I’m pregnant,” she spits, and she doesn’t know how, she can probably guess. Can hear it in his shit-whiny fucking voice: _condoms are ninety-eight percent effective when used correctly but I was high, high enough that I didn’t even know if was you I was sticking my dick in, so god fucking knows I probably stuck the thing on my big toe instead of my cock._ And she laughs, a little hysterically, because _now_ it’s his turn to be stunned and it’s amazing to see emotion on his face again. “Good work.”

Reid stares at her. She thinks, quietly, that she’s never seen anyone who has mastered panic attacks as well as him. His chest barely hitches; his hands barely shake. If it wasn’t for how still and curled inside himself he’s gone, she’d almost think he was simply frozen. She wonders how many other times he’s done this to her, panicked in front of her without hinting at his distress. There’s a sheen to his skin that says he’s on his fourth attempt and a panicked dilution to his pupils that says that fourth attempt is going to come to a crashing halt as soon as his feet hit the tarmac at Quantico.

She turns cruel because she has to. Because she won’t abort this child— _can’t_ abort this child. She’s not fifteen anymore, she’s seen what being alone looks like, and she knows she can be a mom, if given the chance to come to terms with the idea—but she also knows that she would have chosen absolutely anyone else to be the dick that conjured said child than the man in front of her. Maybe the man in front of her four months ago?

Definitely that man.

And maybe she can get him back.

“Go to rehab,” she says, and her voice is a blade that slashes through them both. “Or I’ll abort this child rather than have it come into the world with an addict for a father. And then I’ll tell Hotch, and you’ll go to rehab anyway.”

It’s cruel, but she’s desperate.

She’s never liked feeling desperate.

 

* * *

 

There’s only eight of them that stay over Christmas. Eight of them in a sad little circle, avoiding talking about everything they’re missing on the outside. It’s, for once, Reid who breaks the rule. There’s always one. Always one who quietly snaps and mentions a friend’s name or a favourite book or wonders what the characters on their favourite TV show have been up to recently. It’s never been Reid before.

“I love Christmas,” he says, and remembers that, usually, he _does_ love Christmas, even if all he really feels now is apathy. “I mean, I’m usually working it but that’s okay, because… it’s okay.”

Because he’s with his team when he does, and Christmas is for family. He loves his mom, loves her dearly, but there’s something to be said for spending Christmas with people who always know who he is and never forget to buy their eleven-year-old son a perfunctory gift, even if that gift is a pen that Rossi had filched from the sheriff’s office and wrapped with an origami bow.

“I hate Christmas,” someone snaps, someone angry and hurt. Reid looks at them and thinks that maybe it’s not Christmas they hate, maybe it’s the reminder of being alone. It’s a basic human trait to despise isolation, but a pervasive human condition to become so. When the person speaks next, their voice is apologetic. “Mostly. Mostly, I hate it, I guess. What… what do you do when you work over it?”

“Must be more fun than here,” someone else mutters.

Reid thinks of his team. “We make do,” he answers simply, and remembers how to smile. Does so. He won’t miss another Christmas; he decides this now.

 

* * *

 

“Reid is taking some time off to be with his mom, so we’re a man down,” Hotch tells the team, and he’s mild enough that Emily almost believes that he believes that. When he leaves, she follows him to his office and, behind her, the whispers begin. Let them whisper. She can’t worry about the whispers when all she is right now is fear. Fear that this will fail catastrophically.

It had started with a grey day and learning to fall, and she’s only just starting to realize that none of them had actually learned that lesson.

“Prentiss?” Hotch says, snapping her out of her wavering revere. She’s at the door of his office, hovering tentatively, and he’s watching her from behind her desk with one eyebrow cocked. “Is there a problem?”

She’d planned to be sassy about it. Walk in there with a swing of her hips to say, _I planned this,_ and a smile to say, _I’m nothing but excited_ , but all she does instead is choke on every good intention and whimper in a voice that’s more Reid than her, “I’m pregnant.” It’s probably too early to tell him; in fact, it’s almost certainly too fucking early, only two months cooked, but the only other person she can confide in is currently checking himself into the white-washed walls of the facility that’s going to make him feel like the ghost of his mother. “I—”

And her voice fails her.

When she lets herself think again, she’s on his couch with a glass of water vibrating in her hands and he’s closed the door and the blinds and dragged his office chair to join her on the ‘subordinate’ side of his desk. Not on the couch with her. He’s keeping a careful distance, his posture is rigid, and she hazily thinks that’s he’s being very careful with personal space right now. Her brain catches up with her observations and it’s a heavy gut drop when she realizes she’s been sitting here for almost ten minutes just trembling without saying a word; the scab on her lip is healed, but not the memory of it.

“I’m not hurt,” she says. He seems to collapse inward very slightly, releasing a tension she hadn’t realize he’d been holding until she’d said it. “It was… a huge mistake on my behalf. Monumental. And now you’re going to be two people down…” She trails off, but the damage is done.

“Reid’s leave is fourteen weeks,” Hotch says gently. “You’re not that far along, or you wouldn’t be this rattled. He’ll be back far before you go on leave, if that’s your intent.”

Their gazes meet. Hers is apologetic and his resigned. “Sorry,” she whispers, and it’s not as loud as she’d hoped it would be. It’s just as hard though.

Hotch’s mouth thins, but mostly he just looks weary. Weary and a little bit disappointed. She feels like she’s been hauled up in front of the principal again for throwing firecrackers through the boys’ bathroom window. Except her principal had never been this well dressed or this adept at making her feel small. “I can’t turn a blind eye to this,” he says heavily. She nods. “The functioning of our team depends on inter-team unity. There are… boundaries. Regulations. And I can’t hide this…”

But the hesitance in his voice whispers, _I would if I could_ , and she can’t be mad at him when she knows he’d try for them if he thought there was a way around this. Maybe if Reid was a little less brittle. Maybe if she was a little longer under his wing. Maybe maybe maybe.

“Go home, Emily,” he says, and she realizes she’s been staring at the glass and saying nothing. “Have the rest of today off. And don’t… don’t do anything rash. I can’t hide this, but I do have some power. And… when you speak to Reid next…”

The pauses are unlike Hotch, so she meets his gaze. What she sees there doesn’t make her feel small at all. He’s smiling, sad and a little proud, and she thinks that maybe if they knew each a little better, he’d have hugged her. “Tell him good luck. And congratulations.”

 

* * *

 

The apartment is a dusty mess. Cleaning hadn’t exactly been high on his list of priorities before he’d left and now that’s just another slow tally mark on his list of regrets. He slings his bag onto the couch and looks around at the remains of his old life. And blinks. Because things are different that shouldn’t be. The dishes he knows he’d left to rot in the sink are clean. The fridge is empty, turned off and propped open, and he hadn’t done that. The dust is pervasive, but the apartment is aired. There’s a difference to the placement of everything that suggests someone had spent a good chunk of his weeks away slowly going through every nook and cranny to find what he’d hidden. But he’s okay with that, distantly. They wouldn’t have found anything.

He’d poured it all down the sink and crushed the bottles just to be sure. There’s a sliver of a scar on the inside of his thumb to remind him of the strength that had taken. But, he’s thankful she took the time to remind him that she cares still, even after all the ways he’s hurt her.

_Call me and I’ll come get you_ , she’d told him on her last visit, a winter coat tugged over her shoulders and covering the belly that he tried to sneak glances at from under his lashes. But he hadn’t called her, because when she’d stood, he’d seen the hint of the change in her form and the reminder of his cruelty had been breathtaking. He’d remembered the cut on her lip, the bruises on her wrist, and wished he could remember more of _that_ night than the moment he’d crushed her between the door and his need, even if just to torture himself further with it.

And so, he’d slunk home clean and alone and found himself too tired to do anything but curl into a broken ball on the couch, fully dressed and broken-hearted.

He snaps awake in the gloom of dusk to find her sitting on the floor in front of him, back to the couch and chin on her knees. “I told you to call me,” she says quietly. He wants to touch her but doesn’t remember how. “Did you think we’d forgotten? Garcia has a countdown on one of her screens labelled ‘my baby returns’ and a picture of you in the cake-hat on another.”

“I didn’t want to be a bother,” he says. Her head snaps around to look at him, eyes narrowed.

She reaches up to him and he can’t wince away, there’s nowhere to go. Warm fingers on his jaw, running against the grain of stubble, cupping his cheek with a tenderness that makes a long-neglected part of his chest ache for something forgotten. “We can’t do this, Spence,” she murmurs, and leans forward into him. He thinks, for a wild moment, that she’s going to kiss him but she doesn’t. Instead, she brings his jaw down, their cheeks together, almost nuzzling him. Aching. Needy. He hurts. “We can’t dance around each other. There’s a third person in this fucked up thing we have going now, and we have to grow up for her.”

_Her_.

“A girl?” He looks down and she’s not wearing a coat today. The curve is obvious, tantalizing, and he wants to touch, to examine. A million questions race through his mind on the tail end of two million facts. He wants to voice them all and instead voices none. “We have a daughter?”

“Damn right we do,” she retorts, and kisses his cheek. It’s a touch of her lips, a whisper, and it reminds him that maybe there’s something left of what they’d started, if only he can stop and reach for it. “Now, get it the fuck together. Last thing we need is a teenager with daddy issues.”

That’s true, so he slips his hand down and, after she nods her okay, lets it rest across her belly.  And they wait the night out like that, his first day back.

He’s going to do better.

 

* * *

 

She’d put the whole nursery together herself. She’s really hoping that that’s not going to be a metaphor for this co-parenting agreement that they’ve got going on, but decides that she’s done a good enough job that she’ll just take whatever comes. If it’s a metaphor, let it be, because, _fuck_ , she’d put a crib together—surely, she can raise a kid to be only half as screwed up as the sum of its parents.

At least, that’s what she’s thinking as she critically examines the yellow walls. Yellow, because she has a hard-on for gender neutral that a psychologist would have a field day about and that’s also probably going to be reflected in whatever moniker they saddle their poor offspring with. But there are horses in the paintings on the walls because, deep at heart, Emily Prentiss was never allowed to be a little girl and No-Name Prentiss-Reid is absolutely going to have that chance, even if Emily has to find a pony in the middle of DC. Unless she turns out to be her dad in miniature, with a head that’s sixty percent constantly ticking brains and another thirty percent doe-eyes. Then they’re gonna need to buy a house with a really big damn library.

This is what she’s thinking before Reid shuffles quietly into the nursery for the first time since before it was a nursery. He does it so casually. Dressed in a cardigan thirty years too old for him, hands in his pockets and posture as shitty as ever, he walks in like it changes nothing.

It changes everything.

Because he walks in and she thinks in quick succession: how crappy his dress sense is; how he probably needs a haircut; how right he looks standing with one hand reaching towards the cowboy mobile, fingers tracing the rim of one ridiculous hat; how much she wants/needs/craves him here; how he’s going to be a fucking fantastic father if he gets out of his head long enough to realize he’s Spencer Reid, not William or Diana.

“Is this a mistake?” he asks suddenly, and she shoves all these thoughts away and steps closer to him. One step. Two. _I’m still in love with you,_ she thinks suddenly, and feels tired, overwhelmed, the heavy shape of her stomach a physical barrier between them that’s dwarfed by the emotional one. _And I don’t think you love anything, right now._ His eyes are empty, his face blank, and she almost misses the mask of himself he slips on for others who aren’t her.

“Bit late if it is,” she snaps. To soften the blow, she takes his hand away from the mobile and brings it to rest on her belly. _Smile, you bastard_ , she thinks helplessly, as he looks down at their fingers. _Show me there’s something left for us gals to fight for._

The baby arches inside her, restless with the thump of her heart. Emily feels angry feet patter against her belly and Reid’s tentative palm. And his mouth twitches, his eyes widening.

There it is. The something she needs.

Her final thought isn’t anything so deep. It’s something between, _fucking hormones,_ and, _let’s start fighting now, then,_ and she forgets her stomach and the misshapen form of herself and drags him closer by the collar of his nauseating cardigan. She tries to find his mouth, to remember how to kiss him, but he spasms away with face ashen and mumbles something before almost running from the room. She’s aroused, unhappy, and alone. The baby kicks along as furiously as if she’s born already and railing against the world.

Maybe that’s a metaphor too, but Emily sure as fuck hopes not.

 

* * *

 

He falls in love with her on a blue day. His mother had always hated blue, said it was the colour of being sad, and he’d never quite agreed with that. Bad days in Vegas were yellow days when the sun bleached the world of colour except for heat and everything seemed tinged harsh. Good days were blue. The blue sky stretching endlessly on, the pale pastels of a cool, brisk morning.

He’s always loved the colour. The day his daughter is born, the sky couldn’t be bluer.

He’s not late. He’s not panicked. For the majority of it, very much like the rest of his life, he’s mostly numb. Emily yells and she swears and she promises bodily harm and then she goes very, very quiet for the longest time. He’s learned that when Emily is hurt a little, she shouts a lot. But when she’s hurting more than he knows how to help, she’s silent. As their daughter forces her way out, Emily doesn’t say a word. Just clings to his hand and stares into his eyes with her own wide, desperate, and faintly pleading.

There’s a gasp, a wet slippery sound that turns his stomach, and _she_ arrives. Mute at first, and he feels something _then_ : feels fear and horror and the desire to scream for their baby who isn’t screaming, scream for Emily and the quiet, _why isn’t she crying,_ that slips from her lips, scream for himself and his fragile hopes for the future slipping from his clumsy fingers to fall and shatter on the hospital floor.

But there it is. A startled mewl and the damp sound of lungs filling for the first time, and then she coughs out a half-hearted squeal that he knows is going to be the sound he describes if he’s ever asked to quantify what ‘relief’ sounds like. Emily’s gone limp, glazed over and bug-eyed. Her hand slips from his as the doctor works busily over the wrinkled, slimy shape of another little person, some strangled life that Reid had somehow helped create. Reid’s feeling pretty limp too, buzzed and numb and ill. Hands too big, too still, hanging uselessly by his side, he stares at the baby as she kicks twice, her mouth working busily, and they rush her to her mom.

“Here she is,” they say briskly, thrusting her at Emily. Emily blinks, uncharacteristically lost. And the baby is quiet. Outside, through the wobbly frosted glass window, he can see blue.

“I’ll take her,” he croaks, becoming useful, because Emily needs a moment, just a moment; she’s drugged and shocked and still reeling, and can’t they see she just needs to collect herself? “Please.”

And they hand her to him. Tiny fingers smack against his clumsy hands, but he doesn’t drop her, he never will. He never could. There are some things far too precious to let fall. He blinks, his turn to be pole-axed, and something inside his chest thumps slowly and reluctantly back to life. Something that he’d lost on the floor of a poacher’s shack, or maybe not lost. Just misplaced.

It’s three years before Doyle, and he falls in irrevocably in love that day.

_Elliott_ , they name her. He never forgets this moment.


	3. The Interim

“It’s me. I’m the FBI agent.”

Cyrus smiles a vicious smile, and Emily can see delight in his eyes. He’s not surprised by this announcement, not at all, and she can see how much he’d hoped for this outcome. And she stares. _No no no_ , as Cyrus walks towards them.

There’s nothing she can do.

Reid’s shoulder brushes hers as they yank him up, twisting his arm painfully behind his back hard enough that she can imagine with gruesome detail the sound of it popping out of place. Cyrus leans in close, and Reid stares him down.

There’s nothing she can do.

“It’s me,” Reid repeats emotionlessly. He doesn’t look at her once. Because he knows, the _bastard_ , he knows she can’t do a thing to stop him. At least one of them has to go home to their daughter. At least one. “I’m the agent.”

And that’s why she does nothing as they drag him away.

 

* * *

 

He drives them home from the hospital and hesitates at the door. “The first few weeks are particularly integral to the formation of parental bonds with the newborn infant,” he begins, and Emily turns so quickly she almost smacks him with the carrier.

“Don’t,” she says, putting a hand against his mouth, and the weird thumping _something_ in his chest skips a beat, grows heavier. He blinks. “Don’t quote stats at me, Spence. She’s your daughter. If you want to stay with her, here, you don’t need to rationalize me into it.”

Oh.

So, he swallows, pushes the bevy of facts dancing on his tongue to the side, and instead tries something new. “Can I stay?” he asks. The question is husky because he _wants_ this so bad. “Please. Just for… a while. I promise, I’ll sleep on the couch, help out, I just…” He’s on leave, six weeks unpaid, and he doesn’t want to waste a minute of it.

“Stay as long as you want,” she says, and he honestly thinks she might mean it.

He doesn’t deserve that, but he takes it anyway.

 

* * *

 

Cyrus doesn’t trust her. She thinks maybe he would have trusted Reid, maybe even bonded with him—Reid tends to have the knack of worming under people’s defences without them even realizing he’s there—but she’s a woman as well as a government employee, even if not the type he thinks she is, and she’s pretty sure the combination is everything Cyrus stands against. He keeps her close, his eyes on her, and he doesn’t let her speak. She watches though. Watches as he plots and he plans and he spins a nasty, nasty web with her and Reid and all the innocent people within the compound trapped in the centre. And she hopes to god that outside, her team has her back, because she doesn’t know how to help them from in here. Hopes that Hotch is moving quickly. Hopes he’s moving cleverly, because a brute force entry will leave a trail of bodies.

Beneath all these hopes, the hopes she’s almost certain will come true because her faith in Hotch is three years strong and rarely tested, is another that she needs more than wants. She hopes that Reid, wherever he is, remembers that he once told her he’d never intentionally hurt her.

And him dying would hurt her.

_Don’t you lie to me, Spencer Reid,_ she thinks as the day grinds on with no sign of her skinny bat-shit insane partner/friend/sometimes-more, and then she continues hoping.

 

* * *

 

Sleep is still evasive. At night, the itch returns, the memories, the _thoughts_ , and he curses the constant ticking of his brain. He thinks a lot. Thinks about Elliott and whether she’s going to be cursed/blessed in this way as well, because he’s never really decided if he loves or loathes his brain. Thinks about the bedroom up the hall where Emily is sleeping, tumbled in the bedding he’d once shared with her before he’d destroyed everything they were with against a bathroom wall. Thinks about his team and how much he owes them: Morgan’s soft longing when he’d held Elliott the first time, JJ’s delight, Garcia’s tears, Gideon’s distracted pride, Hotch’s… Hotch’s carefully hidden misery. There are cracks in the man beginning to show, and Reid won’t profile but can see the thought of Haley hanging heavy in the room.

Coping mechanisms aren’t easy to come by, at least, they hadn’t been back when he was a wreck of a man stumbling alone around his apartment. Here, it’s easier. He’s adept at being unnoticed, so he cleans when Emily’s asleep and makes sure he looks like he’s rested before she wakes up. Elliott isn’t much of a sleeper either, and that worries him. It worries Em too. The first week and a half begin to take their toll until, eventually, he pertly reminds her that he’s there, usually awake, and he may as well be the one taking the night shift. Emily looks like she wants to complain—he won’t profile her either, but he knows she worries about being inadequate—but his argument is sound so she allows it.

When Elliott wakes with a shaky whine down the hall, he’s there before it can turn into a shout that will wake her mother. It’s all strangely easy; the feeding, the comforting, the changing. It’s… distracting. And he can’t sully this butter-yellow room with the horse painting on one wall and the child’s first periodic table on the other with his worries and his shortcomings, so he does nothing but think about the baby in his arms. Whispers what he can to her, sometimes not really making sense as his brains notes how tired it is despite his body being wired. She can’t really understand but quietens and listens with scary focus despite that.

_You were focused as an infant,_ he reminds himself, and the fear kicks again as much as the love does until he’s worried she might be able to hear the turmoil in his chest as her ear rests against his heart. _She might be just like you._

“You’re nothing like me,” he promises her, closing his eyes and swaying. That night is a bad one. Jittery. Long. Elliott doesn’t want to sleep; she stubbornly keeps her eyes open despite her hooded eyelids. She refuses her milk and cries when he moves the bottle away. He paces. She snuffles and chokes and threatens to cry, and he desperately considers crawling into the bed with Emily, laying their baby between them, and begging for her company. _Help me_ , he imagines saying, just like she’d begged him so long ago. _I need you_.

But he doesn’t.

Elliott’s too little to lay on the couch so he folds blankets and lays them flat on the living room floor, lying next to her with his hand crooked over her and fingers wriggling. She likes hands. She likes his hands. They’re agile and quick and easy for her undeveloped vision to distinguish at this point of her growth, so he keeps doing that and doing that until his eyes droop and his hand does too and he falls asleep on the floor, waiting for the morning.

 

* * *

 

There’s a girl crying.

“An orphan of your _friends_ out there,” Cyrus spits, and she sees the hate in the eyes of the people surrounding her. “How do you plan to atone for her loss? You government types are all the same. You come in here with your FBI friends and you think you’re helping, but you’re _not_.”

Emily doesn’t reply because she knows he’s baiting her, tempting her, and she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Instead, she waits until he turns away, and then crouches by the girl with her shoulders bowed against the weight of the world. Emily thinks of her daughter in that moment and her heart clenches; the girl is shivering with shock and cold and fright and they’re all too busy parading her as a paragon of war.

“Hi, I’m Emily,” she says softly. The girl doesn’t respond. Emily slides her jacket off, keeping her movements slow, and wraps it around her shoulders. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“Shut up,” snaps Cyrus, furious, and Emily stands up and places herself between the man and the girl. His eyes are the same colour as Reid’s, she notes, the same colour as Elliott’s. She hates him for that. When he steps closer to her and closer still, she knows he’s trying to intimidate her, knows there’s something about her he’s still trying to understand. Close enough that she can taste his sweat, his too-sweet breath, and it makes her hands ache for her weapon. “That’s a pretty trinket you’ve got there,” he says, gesturing to her neck where the chain has swung free of her shirt. “Maybe if you’d stayed home with the man who put it on you, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Stayed in your place.”

Oh, she hates him. Hates the eyes on her breasts, hates the hands that twitch towards the chain hanging heavy between them. _Touch it and I’ll break your fingers,_ she promises him silently.

But he doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

Gideon leaves on a night that threatens rain but never delivers. Reid goes there alone and finds what’s left behind. He goes back to work and tells the others, and then he goes home and doesn’t tell Emily because he’s ashamed of how much he’s letting it hurt him. But she works it out anyway.

The kitchen is bright and he’s stirring his coffee, watching the spoon create a whirlpool that will keep going as long as he does, and the moon is sullen and yellow outside the open window. It’s brisk, the wind blowing through, but he kind of welcomes the cold. It reminds him he’s alive to feel and that, somewhere, Gideon is too.

Even if he never sees him again.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Emily says from behind him. He hears her shuffling towards him. Her gait is the same as it used to be, before the bathroom, before their baby. Light and steady, even when she’s unsure. He closes his eyes and aches for before and hates himself for aching, because he suspects he’s projecting his issues with abandonment onto the daughter he has absolutely no intention of abandoning. “Gideon.”

Reid nods.

And she hugs him. Pulls him away, knocks the spoon from his hands, and bends their bodies together against the kitchen counter. Together from hip to sternum, his hands tracing the bumps of her spine though her thin robe, it’s the closest they’ve been in months and he’s never felt more isolated.

“Strauss is coming down hard on Hotch too,” he says into her hair, feeling the strain building hot in his spine and spreading throughout him as sharp-hot sparking stress that makes his belly cramp and his hands sweat. “Over Gideon. Over the case. Over… us.”

She stiffens. “Us? What does Hotch have to do with what we’ve done?”

He doesn’t want to tell her, not really, but their hearts are beating together and he doesn’t know how not to. “He’s protecting us,” he mumbles, feeling tired. His fingers slip down, trace the delicate bones of her wrist, and he remembers the bruising and shudders hard enough that she feels it and jerks her head up to study his expression. “Strauss wants one of us gone. She’s… focusing on you. Saying you’d be better off elsewhere. Hotch is blocking her. For now.”

But it’s only a reprieve. Something is going to give soon, and he’s terrified that the lines around Hotch’s mouth and the silence of his phone suggests that it’s going to be him rather than Strauss. Gideon gone, Hotch too, and after that, Emily…

He bumps the coffee and it spills; he’s sluggish, too slow, in getting out the way. Hissing out a breath as the hot liquid scalds his thigh, Emily pats at it with a towel and clucks her tongue. “When was the last time you slept through the night?” she asks him. He’s cold without her arms around him. Shrugs. “Go wash that off. I’m going to call JJ… just sleep in my bed, it’s dark in there. I’ll wake you later.”

He’s tired and sad, so he goes. Noting with some small satisfied twist that at least he _feels_ sad. It’s an improvement from nothing, even if wearing his heart on his sleeve means it’s more likely to get battered. He’ll remember later, how the bed smelled of her, how familiar it felt, and he’ll remember snapping awake to find her curled against him, her arm over his waist and mouth against his shoulder. He’ll remember going rigid and awkward, his heart galloping, and he’ll remember her hand tapping his abdomen irritably as she growls, _stop that, fuck. Why are you so scared to touch me?_

And he’ll remember telling her. He doesn’t really remember which words he voices and which he just thinks, but he thinks he says enough of them that it hardly really matters.

_I hurt you._

_Don’t you remember?_

“You’ve never hurt me,” she says, sitting up with burning eyes. “Not physically. It was _sex_ , Spence. I wanted it, I _encouraged_ it! You thought—” Even in the dim light from the hall, he sees her pale. “No. No, Christ, no, never. You were so off your face, I could have put you on your ass if I hadn’t wanted it. But I did. I do. I… do.”

Oh.

“You could probably still put me on my ass,” he says, feeling small and stupid and weirdly empty without this slicing into him like a constant reminder of his cruelty. “You’re stronger than I am.”

_In so many ways._

A hand touches his throat, traces the pulse line. “I’d tell you if you hurt me,” she says, and so he promises her he’ll never hurt her. It’s kneejerk, impulsive, but he means it at the time.

It turns out to be untrue.

 

* * *

 

She’s allowed a room to sleep in and the door is locked. It’s on the opposite side to where she knows her team is watching, and there’s no way to get a message to them. Instead, she tries to sleep and finds herself staring out the window at the wide glow of the moon and thinking about everything that’s been and gone. She feels lost, suspended, in a waiting timeless period where nothing happens until the boot hovering over their heads finally falls, and it’s not fucking _fair_.

They’ve done all this already. The fear, the misery. They’ve worked through it, clawed their way out of the collective graves it had dug for them. She’s watched Reid fall and get up and fall and fall again. Watching the moon out the slit of the window, she’s sickly reminded that maybe he’d never actually hit the ground and this could be the final impact.

Elliott had fallen down a small flight of stairs three months before, when first learning to walk. She’d walked late, walked clumsily, and it was a constant source of frustration for her that her mind could conceive possibilities that her body couldn’t propel her towards. Emily had leapt towards her at her startled scream, but Reid had been quicker, softer, more soothing. Wide, bony hands that seemed so perfectly shaped to scoop their daughter up, testing the bones of her chubby leg even as his other hand distracted the toddler from her frozen almost-howling. A voice that was the right tone of _calm_ , at least until it wasn’t.

_Look, Ellie,_ he’d said, as soon as he’d assured himself the leg was fine, and he’d swung her over the stoop with his hands around her chest. _An object with only one force acting upon it, gravity, is in ‘free fall’. Even things that aren’t falling, but going **up** —_and the girl had whooped as her daddy had swung her into the air— _they’re considered to be in free fall. Like the moon._

_So falling is just like the moon, but quicker?_ Emily had teased, and Reid had winced at her oversimplification of what she was sure was a concept far too advanced for a fifteen-month-old, even _their_ fifteen-month-old.

_What moon?_ Elliott had demanded, pointing up to the sunny sky. Emily considers that maybe her daughter is the cleverest of them all. _No moon._

She touches the chain around her neck, watching the moon that hangs over her and Reid and their team and, somewhere, their daughter, and swallows the memories and the fear. No looking back now, just forward. Free falling, maybe, but Emily knows how to land safely. It had been the first thing they’d learned, after all, all that time ago.

 

* * *

 

He has to relearn how to do his job, and he’s struggling. It’s a montage of broken homes, broken families, broken hearts, and he can handle it all until there’s a child: a bloodied nursery, a sodden crib. Then, he’s panicking. He hides it. That time. The months grind on and he hides it, mostly.

Horror after horror and he goes home to his apartment and paces and thinks about Elliott screaming and, perversely, the screaming stopping, and then he goes home to them. Sometimes it’s late when he breaks and drives there, but he has a key and the bed has been open to him since the absolution of his imagined sins. Emily’s two weeks from coming back to work when she confronts him. It’s Katie that shatters his resolve to push through. Katie Jacobs and, oddly, her asthma.

Two in the morning, it’s dark and cold, and he slips silently through Emily’s front door and checks the locks twice behind him. The first few times he’d done this, he’d worried she’d shoot him. Then he’d worried that she _hadn’t_ shot him, or even shown surprise at his arrival, but she’d just rolled her eyes and said _I know when it’s you, gawky_ , and he’d supposed that was logical enough.

But he doesn’t go to Emily first. Instead, he pads his way shoeless into Elliott’s room and traces his fingers over her snuggly buttoned romper. Her chest shifts below as she slumbers, mouth parted slightly and arm thrown back over the thin mop of curls that promise to be as unruly as his someday soon. He rests his fingers against those bow-shaped lips and focuses on the puff of her warm breath, mind racing. _Should we get her tested, maybe we should just in case, what about allergies, is she breathing strangely, how would I know—_

“I can taste the anxiety in here,” Emily mutters, walking in rumpled and cranky looking. “Stop it. She’s alive, un-murdered, un-abducted, un-whatever it is that you’re convincing yourself she is.”

“How does Hotch _do_ it?” Reid asks, and then winces when he remembers that Hotch goes home to an empty home nowadays. “I used to hate feeling nothing and now I feel too much and it’s affecting my job. We keep seeing parents on the worst days of their lives and, somehow, we’re expected to tell them it’s going to be okay when it’s _not_ , it’s never going to be and—” His breath hitches, wheezes, and Elliott’s eyes open and blink up at him, her hand patting against his and grumpily _bah-bah’_ ing at him.

Emily slips a hand over his hip and pulls him against her, nuzzling against his shoulder. Bizarrely, the anxiety immediately shifts into something darker and hotter that works its way down his spine and points out that she’s probably not wearing all that much under the robe. Shivering deliciously into that feeling, he coughs and flushes and decides he should probably sleep on the couch tonight. “Just move in,” she mutters, and he freezes because _what_. “You’re here all the time. Elliott frets when you’re gone. I… it would be nice. To have a housemate. Co-parent. Live-in computer.”

“I think that would be a mistake,” he says, turning to face her, forgetting how close she is and, _whoops_ , because he brushes against her thigh and her eyes flicker down and darken slightly; he’s not the only one feeling lonely. “You enjoy your space. I would intrude upon that, and the only reason they’re letting us work together still is because we’re not currently in an active relation—”

“I’m not asking for a boyfriend,” she snaps, softly because Elliott is asleep again or something tantalizingly close to it. “I’m offering whatever you need to stop _this_ anxious spiral you throw yourself into every time a case involves children.” She pauses and smiles like a cat. “Although, if you try to sleep on the couch tonight, I swear I’ll just fuck you there.” Her hand ghosts over the front of his pants and decide that matter, fingers coaxing, and his answer slips from his mouth in a startled huff of air. “We’ll talk later. Come on. Remind me how clever your hands really are.”

It’s not really an invitation he can refuse, when worded in that manner.

 

* * *

 

There’s nothing to do in that blank-walled room except wait for her team. For something. She can do that. She’s learned well how to wait over this past year. Waiting and wanting, two things Emily Prentiss was apparently fucking brilliant at even though she’d built her career and personality around bullheadedly just taking what she needed.

Waiting for Reid to come back to her, and he had. Slowly. Fractionally, he’d call it, piece by piece. It was never all at once. It was a smile one day, usually aimed at Elliott, a coughing laugh another. It was agreeing to come out to dinner with Morgan and the two actually sitting together.

It’s him sleeping through the nights now; it’s the way he’s started wearing his shirts instead of simply draping them over the frame of a man. It’s the way she’d coaxed him back into her bed, and the way he’d bared her open under him and found almost all of her hidden secrets.

But it’s also waiting for her to work out what she wants from life, and she’s still working on that. Thinking that maybe she’d made the right choice, nine months ago, but for all the wrong reasons. Thinking that, maybe, if he asks her again, she’ll give the same answer but for the right reasons this time.

 

* * *

 

He has a penchant for fast food that she _hates_ but allows him to indulge very occasionally. It just so happens that she’s in an indulgent mood today. His favourite Indian place is closed, her favourite Chinese restaurant isn’t anywhere tacky enough to satisfy his cravings for salt and grease, and so they end up sitting in the parking lot at KFC in his beat up old Austin with the heaters fogging the windows, waiting for fresh nuggets.

He’s bored, eating the complimentary sauce out of the packets with one idle finger and wondering if she’s indulgent enough that maybe today is when he should bring up The Idea. She’s revolted by him eating the sauce, chair reclined slightly so she can coo at Elliott in her carrier, barefoot with one foot resting on the dash. Staring at the curve of her ankle, licking at the sticky joint on his finger, he says, “We should get married.”

The foot slips and thumps on the floor as she jerks upright and almost head-butts the roof; dark eyes huge and stunned. “I’m… what?” she deadpans, shaking her head slowly like she’s trying to clear her ears from water. “The fuck? You won’t move in with me, but you’ll _propose?”_

“Ma bah b aba,” Elliott adds, and giggles, entirely unhelpful. She’s practising her intonations, inflecting her babbling, and it almost sounds like a question when she sighs a soft, “Da?” at the end. Her mother’s daughter; she sounds fondly exasperated at him.

“I have a logical argument as the foundation for that statement—” he says, right as Emily says warningly, “You fucking better.”

“Would you like an itemized list?”

“Have you prepared one?” Her mouth quirks, leaning forward with her hands on her knees and shuffling her butt around until her back is against the door, hair leaving patterns on the foggy glass. It squeaks as she leans against it and examines him, still almost smiling but mostly shocked.

He doesn’t answer that because long experience with her has taught him that that’s a leading question, and long experience with Morgan has taught him never to fall for the leading questions. But he does have a list, and it begins with priority one: “Elliott. Studies have shown a correlation between children with married parents having improved health, higher performances at school, and greater resilience than those with separated or single-parent families.”

“We were both raised by single parents, and we’re fine,” Emily counters. “She’s not a statistic, and we’re not either. No.”

“If one of us is incapacitated or injured, which is _likely_ in our line of work, access could be restricted for the other since we’re not currently in an active de facto relationship and wouldn’t be until we’ve co-habituated for two years. Medical decisions could be diverted to other parties of a closer biological relation.” _My dad, your mom,_ he doesn’t say but implies.

She shudders but rolls her eyes. “Hotch wouldn’t let that happen,” she says. Her hand twitches towards him. It’s a low blow, reminding her of their mortality, but a crucial one. “And we’re medical proxies. That situation is exceedingly unlikely. Still no. How many more do you have?”

He counts. “Twelve.”

A barking laugh follows that. “You get three. Go.”

“Burial and funeral arrangements if—”

“Two, and stop being a morbid fuck.” But she takes his hand as she says it, and her grip is tight against his palm. “Ew, your fingers are sticky. And smell like sauce. Ew _ew_.”

“Child support if we separate.” That one hurts. _I’m not my father,_ he reminds himself.

“We’re not together, we’re just fucking and… raising a kid. But not together. Next time you propose to someone, don’t bring up separating in the proposal, _Christ_. One left. Also, your disgusting dinner is here.”

That won’t stop her from eating half, he notes, gleefully taking the bag and the extra sauce they offer him for the wait. And then he goes in for the lowest blow of all but one he’s certain of, as he blows on a peeled nugget for the begging eyes in the backseat. “It will certainly annoy your mother.”

Long story short, when Elliott later asks how they got engaged, they tell her a sanitized version of this one.

 

* * *

 

They come for her in the early hours of the morning, crowding into her little room and stinking of sweat and violence and too much male. Her throat is dry, her heart is thumping, and she presses her back against the wall of her prison and fucking hopes that Hotch is on his way.

“Who the fuck are you?” one snaps, aggravated, and Cyrus is watching with his too-familiar eyes; another snarls, “She’s FBI, I told you, same as he is.”

_Is,_ she thinks, and, _thank god, Reid’s alive._ But they’re here, they’re on the cusp of violence, and she knows that can really only mean they _know_. And Reid wouldn’t tell them. Not without…

She gulps down a breath of static air that chokes her. Cyrus steps forward. He’s a charismatic fuck overtop of a slimy interior, and he turns that charm on her as the other men immediately subside. Like trained dogs. Trained dogs holding semi-automatic weapons.

“It’s in your best interest to tell the truth,” he said quietly.

She turns on the trained fear she’s used before to worm her way out tight situations—the trained fear that got her the gig with Doyle, as much as her sass did—and whimpers, “I am. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Maybe that’s a mistake, because she’d showed too much spine when she’d given her jacket to the orphaned girl, and she knows that she’s miss-stepped. For a wild second, she thinks he’s going to strike her and braces for a blow. It comes, but not where she’s expecting.

She’s sentimental under the edges she cultivates, so when Reid had given her the ring, she’d brought the best damn chain and swore she’d never lose the fucking thing. There’s a snap release that, in theory, should stop this, but Cyrus twists that around his fingers and uses the thin chain on either side to pull it taut against her throat with a harsh _uh_ of her air being cut off all at once. Fingers scrubbing at the delicate links, nails tearing, her heart slams in her chest as it registers asphyxia. He’s side on to her and her boot won’t connect, her arm only glances off of him, and Reid’s gonna shoot himself if he thinks his gift is the thing that finally kills her.

“Knew this was familiar,” Cyrus whispers, right as black and red patterns dance across his face. He lets go. She falls. Free fall that lasts a second until her knees connect with a white-hot burst of kneecap impacting stone. “I have one _just_ like it.” It clatters to the floor in front of her as she cradles her bleeding throat. She doesn’t recognise it immediately. Doesn’t recognise the silver under the red fingerprints smearing the surface, doesn’t recognise the twisted links of the snapped chain. It rolls in a half-circle before tangling in itself and falling still.

“Spencer,” she wheezes, staring at her husband’s ring, and that’s when the boot falls.


	4. The Encore

They didn’t exactly dress the part. He’s wearing black trousers and his favourite black vest buttoned neatly over a white shirt. She’s wearing jeans, a purple shirt, and a wicked grin. Elliott is the best dressed out of all of them, wearing a cream-white dress Elizabeth brought her and being bounced on the knee of ‘Grandpappy Rossi’, who’s watching them with a gleeful kind of excitement that has Reid suspecting he’s already planning for one inevitable day when he gets to smirk at the rest of their team and say, “I knew all along.”

They needed two witnesses, and there’s one thing Reid has learned about Rossi in the months they’ve known him: the man loves a laugh and, if phrased correctly, it turns out that Emily can make just about anything sound appealing, even witnessing the secret wedding of two of his colleagues. At least, that’s how Emily justifies it. Reid’s pretty sure Rossi’s also here because the man has a soft spot for Emily that’s a mile long, and a genuine fondness for him that’s the kind that only grows. This is a family moment, and no one ever told Rossi that you can’t declare yourself family after only eight months of working with them. But he doesn’t tell Emily that; she’s avoiding assigning any kind of emotion to this day, and he’s humouring her despite the _something_ in his chest that’s growing frighteningly huge and declaring that it’s probably a dangerously pervasive measure of love.

Their other witness is watching with a barely hidden glower. Reid knows that he’s _highly_ disapproving of this moment but, like any good parent, picking his battles wisely with his wilful children.

“Strauss is going to have all of our heads,” Hotch says, eyeing Reid with the kind of expression that makes Reid’s insides curl up small and worried. But he’s dressed impeccably with the kind of care that suggests he chose his outfit with more thought to the day than Emily—Reid is attempting to be nonchalant, but his hands are sweating and his heart is hammering and there’s a giddy kind of joy whirling in his brain that’s making it hard to stop smiling—and he _is_ here. “You do realize this is insane, Reid.”

Reid shrugs and looks at Emily. She’s waiting, chatting with the minister, calmer even than the time they took Elliott to get her first round of vaccinations. There had been tears that day, and only some of them had been Reid’s. “It’s not,” he says, and watches her smile and laugh, her gaze skipping to Elliott on Rossi’s knee and softening imperceptibly. “This is the sanest I’ve ever been.” And Hotch just watches them and nods, as though he’s seem something they haven’t. Which is entirely possible. Reid’s fully aware that he’s blind when it comes to his family. He suspects he always will be.

But he’s also a little bit ill-behaved. Emily had said no vows, and he’d planned to abide by this. In and out. Ten minutes max.

He’s a bit of a liar, sometimes.

“Wait,” he says, as they’re about to finally sign the paperwork that legally binds them. He thinks that this really is the oddest way to make a family. “I, ah…”

“No vows,” she hisses again, flushing. Even in jeans, she’s beautiful.

“They’re not vows,” he says defensively. “Just… I want to say something. Something short.”

“Ah heck, it’d be worth the price of admission if the kid can actually keep something short and sweet,” Rossi says, grinning and unwrapping one of the gummy sweets that he keeps procuring for Elliott and splitting it with her. She kicks happily at the gift, fingers gloopy with saliva and sugar, and clings to his thumb with the hand not currently ramming the head of the snake down her throat. Hotch sighs at them, but he’s smiling.

“Fine,” Emily mutters, rolling her eyes, and the minister is staring at them both like they’re the oddest things he’s seen all day. Which is likely. Emily _had_ begun the ceremony by walking in and declaring, _you guys do refunds if he turns out to be a bunk choice, right?_

Reid slips his hand into his pocket, knowing she’s going to hate this but doing it anyway. “These aren’t wedding rings,” he says, to forestall the storm that shifts over her face when she sees them, and she exhales warningly. The bands are plain. Silver and completely unadorned. “I love you, Emily. I’m standing here declaring that I’ll happily spend the rest of my life with you because I believe that love is built from companionship and friendship… and you’re my best friend. The mother of my child. The person who taught me it’s okay to ask to help, that it’s okay to fall… the person who helped me get up again when I did…” He reaches for her hand and presses one of the rings into her palm, holding it there as he holds her. “These rings are to signify that I’m going to stand by your side, as your best friend and—secret—husband for as long as you’ll have me. We’re going to raise our child together. And we’re going to be _fantastic_.”

“You idiot,” she mutters, staring at his shoes with her cheeks prettily pink. “I thought you said this doesn’t change anything.”

“It doesn’t,” he says honestly. “I’ve always felt this way about you. And I always will.”

Hotch and Rossi are quiet as the registry is signed and Reid and Emily become husband and wife but only really in name—barely even in that, because Emily is keeping her name and they’re not telling a soul—but when they hug them after, they’re slow to let go and their eyes are bright.

 

* * *

 

Her lip is bloodied and fat, her tongue a thick mess in her mouth, bitten through when the boot slammed her jaw shut, but he still looks worse. They drag her into the room they’ve been keeping him in, and it’s a room of fucking horrors. He’s slumped against a wall, one leg thrown outward with uncharacteristic abandon and the other drawn tight against his chest, arms draped over it and head rocked forward so that his hair hangs lank over his face and hides the worst of what’s to come. Cyrus has one hand wrapped through her hair, close to her scalp, and her eyes prickle with the pain of that as her feet stumble and scuff on the brown-splattered floor.

_Don’t look up_ , she thinks suddenly, because maybe she doesn’t want to see him like this and he’s never been good with watching her hurt.

But he looks up. She’s weirdly relieved to realize they’ve mostly spared his face. Mostly. There’s a split across his cheek that looks deep and sore and a bruise that’s coming up wide enough across his temple that she’s already planning a concussion check. And his face empties when he sees her, like it hasn’t since before he’d come back. He stares at her throat, the red-thin line where Cyrus had nearly garrotted her with the gift Reid had given her. In a split second, he’s the Reid of two and a half years ago; the Reid that Hankel had taken and taught to hate.

He’s very, very quiet, his face grossly blank. He’s never been one for masochistic shows of overt masculinity, but he’s also never been one to stand aside while someone is being hurt either. She _knows_ there’s anger hidden inside his sweater vests and mild smiles. She wonders, abstractedly, what he’ll do when they hit her in front of him.

She finds out.

 

* * *

 

Ellie has claimed the knee of every BAU member thus far and seems to be steadily ensuring her continued right of access to them. Reid watches quietly as she has a short but intent battle with Hotch over whether or not she can eat his tie, consisting mostly of Hotch quietly saying, _no, Elliott_ , and her responding crankily, _but why?_

Around them, as Reid has discovered, the party is very much taking place without the birthday girl. Despite his loud and consistent reservations about the _point_ of throwing a birthday party for a one-year-old, he’s starting to realize that parties for one-year-olds are mostly an excuse for the one-year-old’s extended family to get drunk and eat tiny snack-sized versions of adult food. He’s not really complaining though, since JJ has left the bowl of gummy snakes near him and he’s quietly working his way through them.

“She likes hands,” Reid offers, noting that Hotch still hasn’t won the tie-battle. Two heads turn to face him, both wearing cheerful party hats. Hotch’s, Reid notes, is pink. It’s the only pink one in the house. Reid’s pretty sure they didn’t _buy_ any pink party hats, so he’s really not sure where it came from. “Like this.” He shuffles forward, abandoning the candy, and holds his hands in the air with his palms to his daughter.

The smile is instant and focused as she reaches for his fingers, carefully mapping out the lines and curves of his hands despite her having probably memorized them already. He flicks his fingers, making what would be shadowy shapes if there was a light to cast shadow, and she cackles and attempts to clumsily mimic his movements.

“Huh,” Hotch says, turning her slightly and replacing Reid’s hands with his own. Given the opportunity for novelty, Elliott immediately latches on, whispering, _phin-ga, phumb,_ as she taps at the labelled parts. Reid swallows his misgivings. “She’s… advanced.”

“Thirty percent developmentally advanced on her cohorts in verbal abilities, by my calculations. She’ll keep that up for far longer than you’ll be able to.” Reid is quiet, hearing Morgan walking up behind them. “Tunnel vision. Watch what happens if you stop.” Hotch does, and the whining is immediate as the toddler shakes her head and grabs at his hand. “And this. Which is the index finger, Elliott?”

“Dis,” she says, and grabs Hotch’s ring finger, face furrowed in concentration.

“Once more. Try again.”

This times she’s silent, shifting her grip to the right one and earning a gentle _yay_ from Hotch, who smiles sadly. Thinking of his son, most likely. Reid aches for him.

“Aw hey, Reid two point oh,” Morgan jokes, flicking Reid’s party hat and grinning down at him. “We’ll be sending her to Harvard for her tenth birthday.”

There’s a terse laugh from the doorway at that. Reid winces. “She is what she is,” Emily says, and her voice is thin. She’s hovering, her face torn between amusement and worry. As she quickly ducks back out of sight, he follows.

“This was a possibility from the beginning,” he says to her back as he gently closes the door between them and the rowdy sounds of Morgan aeroplaning Elliott through the air. “We knew this. It’s not just genetics, it’s upbringing, and I can’t help but be how I am around her… some osmosis of that was to be expected…”

“I know, I know,” Emily snaps, reaching for her drink and gulping it far too quickly. “Jesus fuck, Spence, don’t I know. It’s good, she’s smart. Going to probably be smarter by the end of it. What parent wouldn’t want that?”

“But you’re upset.” It’s a statement, not an accusation. His own emotions on the subject are a jumble, he can hardly blame her for her confliction. But he grew up alone, isolated, and Elliot wouldn’t be... “Talk to me.”

“That’s the thing,” she says, and puts the drink aside to step into his arms, accepting his support. “I don’t know how to reach you half the time when you get all wrapped up in that brain of yours. By the time she’s five, I’m going to be alone at the dinner table while you two bounce off into your own shared world where I can’t follow. What use am I to her?”

Resting his chin on her hair, he folds his body around her and lets her lean into his comfort. “How can she not have a use for you?” he asks honestly, reclining so he can find her mouth. “Her clever, sensible mother. Brave. Strong. I can’t be those things for her, but you can.” Every statement is another hungry kiss, punctuating his assertions to her. “She needs you like I need you.” Flickering his glance back towards the closed door, assuming that they’re being given space by their perceptive friends, he takes the opportunity to slip his hand up her shirt, along the firm skin of her belly, tripping on the wire of her bra and finding the ring that hangs on the chain between her breasts. Tracing his finger over it, the heat from her skin warming the metal, he murmurs, “Unequivocally.”

“Christ,” she whispers, arching into his hand. “Stay after the party?”

“As long as you want me, I’m here,” he replies, and finds her mouth again with his own.

 

* * *

 

There’s a window. Which means there’s every possibility Hotch can hears this.

She really fucking hopes not.

She can take it. She can take anything they throw at her. Nothing they do to her will break her, not when she has to be silent and strong so _he_ doesn’t panic, not when she has to survive for their daughter. She can’t fight back; they have guns and itchy trigger fingers and Reid will get involved. She has to…. take it. That thought becomes hazy as the world turns to pain and her focus tightens. Elliott Elliott _Elliott EliottElliottElliott…_

_Elliott_ , as her head hits the ground and she curls to avoid another blow that will incapacitate her beyond this moment. _Elliott,_ as a boot rams into her hip. _Don’t blow this for me, Hotch_ , she thinks once, and hears a grunt that she doesn’t think is hers. Is pretty sure that isn’t hers. _I can take this. Don’t… react…_

But someone reacts.

She makes a noise, a single husking gasp as a hand grabs her collar and twisting it against her already bruised throat, and there’s a snarl that doesn’t sound like anything she’s ever heard a human produce. Reid doesn’t say a word. Just makes _that_ noise and surges upright. She hits the ground on her ass as the world wavers and stops making sense. Blinking it back into focus takes a minute. A minute too long. A minute of the three men turning on Reid as he silently puts everything she and Morgan have tried to teach him into play. The men have guns, but they don’t take him seriously.

A blink and he ducks a punch, weaving back, and she knows he can’t win and tries to scream at him to, _just fucking stop, idiot!_ Another blink and he’s slammed his hand against a man’s throat; the man drops like a stone. Reid’s physically inept, but he knows how human bodies work. How human bodies break.

Another blink and they’ve got their guns up. He’s a threat now.

Another blink and he throws himself forward into a tackle. Hits the ground on top of one of the men. There’s a thud of body against stone, a gun goes off, the window shatters. He rolls out of the impact and staggers up, foot lashing out. Bone breaks. It’s not his.

Another blink and she’s up now. There’s a gun in his hand; his eyes are cold. He hasn’t said a word. He brings the butt down on a skull; the sound is wet and horrifying. There’s one man left. Two guns. Emily wobbles up, finds the man’s semi-automatic. He’s dead. There’s no denying it. The memory of a voice whispers to her: _each year, traumatic brain injuries contribute to a substantial number of deaths and cases of permanent disability._

Two guns versus one. The remaining man hesitates. It’s the one who’d tried to choke her. “Get on the ground,” Reid says. Somehow, his voice is more frightening than the blood on his hands and shirt. “ _Now_.”

Instead, the man goes for the trigger.

Reid shoots first.

Then he turns on Emily without missing a beat; taking those few yawning steps between them and lurching into her arms, dragging her close and kissing her like he’d never expected to do so again. It hurts. It hurts so fucking much, her face is a bruise and his is bleeding, and still she returns it because she’d considered never having this again. It’s over in seconds and he pulls away.

But it’s long enough.

He kisses her like he’s madly, impossibly, violently in love with her, and he just killed two men and incapacitated a third because of that. She feels sick. She feels wild.

He kisses like he was terrified.

“We have to get to the children,” Reid says, moving to the door without allowing his battered body to slow him. “They would have heard the gunfire outside. They’ll be moving in.”

It’d be a massacre.

Emily touches her mouth, just once, to see if it’s as broken as she feels it might be, and then she grips the gun close and follows him out the door.

 

* * *

 

Elliott finishes her birthday by politely waiting until their guests are out the door— _bye bye, Wossy_ —and then vomiting on her mother. Biting back laughter at the expression on Emily’s face as she hands their red-faced and squirming daughter over to him with a pert, _adoption papers now, please_ , he wisely decides that it’s probably clever to change and wash the child and then tuck her out of sight for the foreseeable future.

“Ow,” Elliott says sadly, patting her stomach. “Daddy, ow.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you pretend you haven’t had any sweets to every new person who walks past you,” he informs her. “I know. I do it often. It’s only worth it at the time, Ellie, trust me. Bath and bedtime now?” She doesn’t really seem keen on that idea but as soon as her head hits the crib, she’s out like a light. Which is fortunate.

It’s occurred to him that Emily is very likely in the bedroom getting changed. Which means, less clothes.

This is a pleasing idea. A pleasing idea that is, unfortunately, foiled by Emily _not_ being in the bedroom. Or the bathroom. Sad-faced, he pads morosely down the hall and finds her pants-less in the kitchen, grumbling as she tosses her clothes into the washer and seemingly unaware of him prowling behind her.

Well. Never let it be said he’s not adaptable.

“Wha—fuck!” she yelps, as he picks her up by her hips and turns her to face him, almost earning a foot to the crotch. He’s glad she clicked on quickly, distinctly not at all interested in finding out how it feels to be kicked there in his current state. “You’re like a cat! Wear a damn bell!”

Lifting her onto the washer, he crowds against her, making sure his hair is hanging in his eyes and giving her the best plaintive _want_ expression he knows through it. “Hi, hello,” he murmurs, wiggling forward until he’s flush against her body and mouthing damply at her neck. “I’m a fan of this.” He trails his hand up her bare thigh for emphasis, rubbing his fingers in the sensitive fold between her thigh and hip.

Her breath hitches sharply. “Pervert,” she breathes, rubbing against him despite her mock scolding, her leg bumping against his front. “Jesus, feel that. Not half keen, are you?”

“Thinking about you all night,” he replies, dropping to his knees, ignoring her shocked, _what are you—,_ and doing _exactly_ what he’s been thinking about all night. She’s stunning. Stunning with her leg hooked over his shoulder and his head heavy between her legs. Stunning as he uses his mouth and his tongue and, eventually, his fingers as well, drawing her against his lips and exploring her greedily. She’s striking, glorious, heady, and he’s head over heels for this. Her hand threads through his hair with just the right amount of pressure; she’s rocking into his mouth as he uses his tongue to tease her open, his thumb tracing patterns that make her moan in just the way he likes, vocal, and he has to take a respite to undo his own pants and tug himself free before the constricting pain turns biting.

“Not gonna… get, ah, fuck, let me, ah… get me off in the kitchen, are you?” she gasps, writhing against his mouth with her eyes locked on his, and so he slips his fingers inside her as an unspoken, _I absolutely am._

“In the kitchen,” he murmurs, standing with his hand still working her apart, “then in the bedroom, perhaps the bathroom after… I’ve calculated my refractory period. I can…” He has to take a breath here because her hand has found him, trying to coax him forward and into her, but that’s not the plan here. Yet. By the time _that_ happens, he wants her blissful, pliable, almost shattered. He wants her slow and lazy, so he can show her exactly how he feels with the sedatest sweep of his hands and his hips. “… keep this up for steadily increasing incremental periods over the next several hours. You might not be quite so lucky, however, age does—”

“Holy shut the fuck up,” she chokes, cover his mouth with her hands. “You were doing so well.” He twists his wrist, curves his finger. He _is_ doing well. She comes with a groan, for the first time. But not the last.

His brain does come in handy, sometimes.

 

* * *

 

There’s two men guarding the children and the women, but the men don’t argue when Emily walks in there with Reid at her back and semi-automatics in their hands. Reid holds his awkwardly, unhappily, but he _is_ holding one, and the two men and their Glocks quickly decide that maybe a quick retreat is the best of their options.

As soon as the men’s footsteps have died away, the sounds of gunfire building overhead, they lower their weapons. “We’re not going to hurt you,” Emily soothes, and Reid says nothing because he’s still wired as fuck and dancing on adrenaline’s edge. The women watch, their arms around as many kids as they can handle, the rest clustered behind them. “But we need you to listen to us, please. We’re going to keep you and your children safe, if you listen to us.”

Reid moves forward. “Down on the ground, bellies flat, quickly,” he coaxes. The women exchange a glance between them before slowly complying. He’s getting them out of range if someone comes in shooting, making them smaller targets, and Emily decides to trust him and turns back to the doorway, shoving a desk in front of it. Anything to give them a few extra seconds to process, react, respond.

The gunfire moves closer.

She tilts her head back. Reid is crouched, the butt of his weapon steady on his thigh, his eyes locked on the door. Not aiming. His hands shake against it, the knuckles split and oozing, but his bloodied fingers are firm. There’s a girl huddled against his back—the jacket she’s wearing is Emily’s, her eyes locked on his face—and he’s allowing it. For a bullet to hit her, it has to punch through him first, and Emily wavers. Thinking of Elliott.

“Everything is going to be okay,” she says firmly, readying her gun. She’s the one who’ll shoot first. Reid is wired and he knows it. He’ll wait for her cue.

The gunfire shifts closer.

 

* * *

 

JJ is taking to being pregnant with an ease that reminds him that he didn’t get to see how Emily had handled those first few months. He slinks up to his friend, watching the sly smile teasing her mouth as though she’s ever aware and content about the state of things, and the confident rest of her hand on her still-flat abdomen. It hurts.

He’s so, so happy for her, but he’s equally as heartbroken that he missed this with his child. And he knows there’s no getting that time back; it was the price extracted for the pleasure he’d obtained from the drugs that still whisper alluringly to him on the nights he sleeps at home instead of Emily’s. Oddly, on the _really_ bad nights, he’s never really alone. He doesn’t know how Emily knows… but she always does and his cell hums with, _Elliott won’t take a bath tonight and I have no idea why, why aren’t you here dealing with this,_ or a cheeky, _thinking about you tonight ;),_ or even, once after a case had gone horribly wrong in the worst possible way, a simple, _I’m proud of you_.

He’s never slipped.

“JJ,” he says, standing awkwardly in front of her. She turns to him. The bullpen is dim, everyone else is gone. Emily was with him for the other half of this duty, the day they’d gotten married, and Reid feels the weight of that secret hanging heavy around his neck. But they’re on thin, thin ice already with their jobs, and the others knowing will change the unit irrevocably. JJ smiles at him, worry slipping into her expression, and he knows he’s stalled too long.

“Spence, what’s wrong?” she asks, tapping the desk. He slips onto it, crooking his leg against the drawer, and traces his fingers across the surface.

“I know we should have done this earlier,” he says. They should have. They didn’t. They’re reckless, the both of them, both ever aware of their mortality and flaunting it at the same time, and they need to do better. “But… we, that is, Emily and I… we want you to be Elliott’s godmother. And, um. If something happens… legally… we need to put down who can… take her.”

JJ is stunned, eyes widening. “Spence, oh,” she breathes, and takes his hands. Hers are small, careful, and he imagines her holding their daughter if they can’t and something tight and worried in his chest eases a little. “Of course.”

It’s the work of a second to ease down and wrap his arms around her, thanking her with his awkward hugs and stammering words. “You and Will, or Hotch if you can’t,” he tries to explain, shrugging helplessly. “You’re the ones we’d trust with her if… if we... for any reason. Please?”

“Yes,” she promises, and he relaxes. “But nothing is going to happen to you, silly. Don’t be paranoid.”

But it’s his one duty as a father; making sure his daughter will never be alone.

 

* * *

 

He’s sitting on an unmade bed in the emergency department, looking sore and tired and completely fucking done with today. Oddly, Morgan isn’t by his side despite having glued himself to him since dragging them both out from the bowels of the compound.

She steps inside and tugs the curtains shut, giving them the illusion of privacy, and inches closer to study him. He smells faintly of sweat and stronger of the glue they’ve stuck his cheek back together with. Antiseptic, smoke, fear, and, underneath it all, the familiar intricacies of _him_. She remembers standing this close so many years ago and wishing she could learn that scent.

She knows it now. Stepping closer still, she takes his hands in hers and presses their knees together. His fingers tease hers, deft and loving, and she can look down and visualize them holding a gun and a baby and her body and everything in-between.

“Can we go home yet?” he asks, his voice rasping and strained. She wonders what other damage he’s sustained and glances at his chart, tossed on the bed beside him where he’d been skimming it. “Don’t look at that. That lies. Trust me.” A shaky smile. “I’m a doctor.”

“Grade three concussion. You lost consciousness??” she asks, and he looks down and away. She hates Cyrus so much fucking more. “Fractured cheekbone. Suspected broken ribs? Should you even be sitting up? Where’s your doctor?”

“My torso is a Picasso painting of purple and green,” he replies, ignoring her questions and wincing as her fingers accidentally skim the bandaging around his knuckles. Underneath the cotton weave, they’re split and raw. “Do you know how much blunt force trauma it takes to break the average adult bone, assuming a healthy diet and no genetic influences—”

“Marry me,” she interrupts, and he blinks sluggishly at her as his battered brain whirs and chugs and fails to process her words.

“I think we did that,” he says finally, pulling one hand free to scratch tentatively at his nose. “Ow. Ow. I don’t know if that’s my nose hurting or my hand, ow. We did that, right?”

“Marry me properly,” she clarifies, and uses her free hand to draw his ring from her pocket. It’s clean, scrubbed free of dirt and his blood and Cyrus’s touch in the ladies’ bathroom before she’d come to find him. The chain is fucked, lost, probably a melted spool back in hell somewhere, but she’d saved the ring. “I mean, shit, it’s not like we’re traditional so far, what’s getting married twice? Except this time, we tell more people than Rossi and Hotch. We do the whole shebang. You can be all sappy and cry and I can dress up pretty and make Garcia coo and Morgan and Rossi can flirt with all my single friends.” She finds a finger that doesn’t look too sore, an interesting task indeed, and slides the ring overtop to hang loose around the second joint. Letting him slip it on the final length. Resting her own hand over-top so he can see the silver around her ring finger.

She’d almost lost it once. She refuses to take it off again.

His fingers trace over it, around it, testing it. It fits perfectly, of course it does, because this genius is apparently great at is estimating the size of her finger. And, also, kissing her.

“Ow,” she breathes into his mouth as his lips brush gently against her jaw, avoiding the bruises and the neat line of stitches along her bottom lip. Despite this care, this painful reverence, the kiss is lingering and something in her shifts and settles at the touch.

“Okay,” he says, closing his eyes and pressing their mouths together one more, not kissing or moving, just breathing, his hand rubbing small circles into the skin of her arm. “Yes.”

 

* * *

 

They’re clingy that night. Emily is so rarely clingy that it’s almost more frightening than the events of the day. She brings Elliott into the bedroom and holds her firm on the bed, wide hazel eyes watching Reid carefully from under the blonde-brown curls that Emily battles her nightly to get brushed. Reid tilts his head to the side, sucking in a sharp breath as his ribs react to the movement and notes where his daughter’s hair is already darkening at the roots, losing its baby-blonde. They’re all exhausted, too exhausted to do more than offering to drive their nanny home, and this knowledge only tires him more. _Stop growing,_ he thinks bizarrely, because it’s illogical that he would even think that that could possibly work.

“Okay, baby, you’ve got to be careful,” Emily is explaining, and Elliott listens intently. “Daddy is sore. We’re going to lay down quiet and tell stories instead of bouncing around, okay?”

“Okay,” Elliott repeats, nodding, and when Emily releases her, she crawls awkwardly next to Reid and curls up next to him. Reid winces as her palm smacks his rib accidentally but smiles anyway when she jolts and looks up at him, startled at his noise. “Ow, Daddy?”

“Ow, Daddy,” he agrees, hugging his arm around her and letting her press against his side like a kitten. Emily does very much the same, cocooning their child between them with her face a mass of bruising that he aches to look at every time he does so. Elliott falls asleep first, but neither of her parents do. They lay there listening to her breathing and being thankful for every moment.

 

* * *

 

It’s a respite from the strain of work. They’re both restricted to desk work while they heal and while they’re under investigation to ascertain whether the force used during the Cyrus case was appropriate. Emily is pretty sure they’ll both pass, and it’s probably the only time she’s grateful that Cyrus didn’t pull any punches. But there’s no hiding it now. There’s recordings of the beatings, recordings of the questioning, recordings of the exact moment Cyrus had said to Reid, _well, this is a surprise… I wonder how emasculated someone has to be to bring their **wife** along to protect them_.

And while the Bureau knew about their impromptu wedding and they’re listed as husband and wife, the rest of the team hadn’t. And there was every chance that two people had died because of it. The team is shocked. Morgan is angry. JJ is speechless. Garcia alternates between excited and teary. And Hotch says nothing, because the higher ups are coming down hard on him, on Emily and Reid as well, and there might be nothing they can do this time to forestall what’s coming. So, this is a respite.

And an apology.

“Reid’s planning something,” Emily says to JJ as they prepare together, JJ clucking her tongue over Emily’s hair and fiddling with the back. “He’s all quiet and squirrelly.”

“He’s going to resign to save Hotch’s career,” JJ replies. Emily winces. She’d suspected as much, caught him browsing suspicious looking emails from surrounding colleges three weeks back. “Or step aside. They’ll scramble to keep him if they think he’s going to leave—he’ll get transferred to White Collar or counterintelligence.”

“Bastard.” Emily yanks her dress into place angrily, already planning on walking out there and giving him a goddamn piece of her mind, guests or no damn guests… “He hasn’t said a word.”

“Of course, he hasn’t,” JJ says pertly, her own dress tight around the swell of her belly. Emily’s glad they’re doing this in Rossi’s bathroom and not her own. The walls there are always a minefield of possible Elliott handprints or Reid science experiments. “Because you love the BAU, Em.”

“So does he.”

JJ sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, looking sad and amused all at once. “He loves a puzzle,” she corrects. “And he loves you. The BAU comes third on that list. You… you need the savagery of the unsubs we tackle so you can stay mad at them, stay focused. That’s what drives you. Seeing the lives we save, facing the evil and staring it down. Spence? I think he gets scared by looking into the darkest sides of humanity. Sometimes, I think… I think he worries he’ll see something he recognises looking back out. This might not be the worst thing for him.”

They’re both thinking of the drugs. Of Hankel. Emily chokes something down, something hard to swallow and bitter tasting.

There’s a knock on the door. A voice floats through, Emily’s mom: “Are you ready, sweetheart? It’s almost time.”

JJ smiles. “Come on,” she says, gesturing to the door. “Let’s go get you married. Again.”


	5. The Desolation

Spencer looks… determined. Determined, and striking. It’s not just the finely tailored suit, cut closely to the lines of his body. It’s not the neat curl to his hair. It’s not even the salient way he looks standing in Rossi’s yard at the end of a makeshift aisle, visible through the lines of their family and standing tall and steady with his eyes locked on her. Well, those things help.

But mostly, it’s his expression.

He’s looking at her like they’re alone. Like there’s no one else around them. She walks up to him and swallows. The world is quietly waiting, despite the coughs and the murmurs of the select crowd. “Stop looking at me like that,” she mumbles, because she hates feeling like her footing is off and his gaze is _riveting_.

“Like what?” he asks.

“Like you can’t look away.”

He smiles and reaches for her hand. “Free fall,” he whispers, as there’s a call for quiet. Morgan is filming because Garcia demanded it, and Emily pokes her tongue at them. “I can’t stop a body in motion until it reaches the end of its descent.”

“The hell does that mean?” she snaps, and JJ mutters, _shh, you two,_ from behind them.

He shrugs, smiling shyly at Rossi, the chosen ‘I get to officiate this time since it’s just semantics, right?’ “It means I can’t look away,” he says finally, and squeezes her hand with a clammy palm, “and I doubt I’ll ever be able to.”

 

* * *

 

The halls are quiet, despite the noise. He’s not alone. He’s never been more alone. Rossi is touching him. Won’t stop touching him. His elbow, his shoulder, trying to guide him. Reid doesn’t want to be guided. He tugs away. He just wants her.

“When can I see her?” he asks a doctor, who doesn’t seem to understand. “Hey! My… Emily. Emily Prentiss, she was admitted, please. _Please_. When can I see her?”

“Spencer,” Rossi says. Touches again. Reid remembers his voice in the bullpen, finding Reid slumped at Emily’s desk, waiting. In the department he hadn’t been a part of since transferring out almost three years before. _Spencer. Stay calm. We’ve found her._

“I’m sorry.” The doctor is firm. “She’s in surgery. You’ll have to wait.”

_There was an incident. The man she was tailing… she’s in surgery._

He’s alone, despite the hand on his arm.

“Just sit down,” Rossi soothes. “Come on. Morgan, help me.”

_Come on. I’ll take you there. Come on, son._

“I can’t,” Reid says, more to himself, to everyone, to no-one, really, except the one person he _needs_ to be listening. “I… _can’t_.”

 

* * *

 

“Me first,” she says, and Spencer rolls his eyes at her. _Cheeky shit._ “Because if I let you go first, we’ll be here all day.” There’s a low chuckle that follows that. No one trusts Spence with a speech. Vows. Whatever involves giving him free reign over speaking. “Spencer. In front of everyone—this time—I take you exactly as you are.” His eyes widen. Still shocked, even now, that she loves him for _him_. “As my husband, already, technically. As my best friend, always. As the father of our daughter. As you. Just you. Our lives run in parallel, side by side but together, and I vow that it will always be so. My today and all of our tomorrows… I vow to you.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t realize he’s there. He walks in behind them. Coffee in hand, and JJ casually breaks his heart.

_She never made it off the table._

He sets the coffee down gently on the magazine rack next Garcia, ignores her startled cry, and walks out. _Reid!_ someone calls, but he’s not Reid, not right now. He’s Spencer; he’s Spencer, and he’s shattering.

_She never made it._

 

* * *

 

Spencer shuffles. Flushes. Someone makes a soft noise nearby and they both look. Elliott is sitting on Diana’s knees with her grandma’s mouth pressed against her hair. Spencer smiles at them, his eyes both dark and oddly bright.

“You’re supposed to say something now,” Rossi says in a stage whisper, earning a sharp, _Dave,_ from Hotch. Jack stands at his dad’s side, waves to his mom in the audience.

It’s two years before Foyet, so she waves back.

“Emily,” Spencer begins, and his voice is stronger than she feels right now. Stronger than he looks. Even after all this time, he still… somehow… surprises her with his strength. _Nothing can knock you down for long, can it?_ she thinks suddenly, as he steps minutely closer. “A falling person at low altitude will reach terminal velocity after about twelve seconds. In that time, they fall almost four hundred and fifty metres. They will then maintain this speed without falling any faster, until their descent is complete.”

Oh god, he’s going to be completely _nerdy_ about this.

His chest expands in a heave as he sucks in a great breath. “I’ve been falling for what feels like forever, and I’ve only just realized,” he says, and swallows hard. “I think maybe everyone else realized a long time ago.”

_No shit,_ mutters Dave, and he is _so_ fired from officiating if she gets married again.

“I know this sounds like a strange analogy for a wedding,” Spencer’s saying, and he’s turned slightly away, gesturing to his mom who stands and sets Elliott on her wobbly feet, holding her hand firmly. Emily stares, flummoxed. “A fast descent to earth from the heavens culminating in a sudden and, almost assuredly, fatal impact… it’s not very romantic. But I’m not really very romantic. I’m awkward, reticent, perpetually convoluted, and you love me anyway. You’re standing here, anyway. But an object in free fall… it doesn’t technically ever have to land.”

“A moon, Mama,” Elliott says, with a coax from her grandma, and staggers those last few stumbling steps towards them. There’s something in her hands.

“Oh my god, you gave the rings to a toddler,” Emily breathes, diving to rescue them, but Spencer beats her there and scoops their daughter up, holding them between them.

“The moon is technically in free fall, that’s right, sweetheart,” Spencer says to Elliott. He takes the rings with a murmured, _thanks,_ and kisses her cheek. “And it’s always going to be. A light in the sky when it’s dark, something to look at and know that things that seem impossible to reach really aren’t that far… I guess, it really is the right analogy for us. Because we took our time getting here, but now we’re here… I don’t plan on ever landing.”

The box is open, and their rings are there. The same, but different. There’s the nick on hers from Cyrus. The dent on his from where he got it caught in a drawer.

But different.

“You had them engraved,” she says, looking at the inner band of hers as he holds it out to her with the hand not holding their child. “With… math.”

“The equation for the inverse-square law gravitational field,” he explains, and, _holy shit,_ _I’m so fucking in love with you I can’t think, you strange, weird, fucking fantastic man,_ she thinks wildly. “Two objects in space orbiting each other in the absence of other forces. Emily, I stand here and take you as my wife—again—and promise to be whatever you need me to be. A light or a hope or anything in between… I promise.”

 

* * *

 

_Spencer._

He blinks. Blinks again. Looks up.

Hotch. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

Home. Elliott.

_Emily_.

There’s a neat bag on his lap. Personal possessions. Her ring is on top. Why did they take her ring? He tilts it, examines the engraving on the inside. _Free fall._ He’s still falling. Not for long though. He can sense the ground.

_Come on. Let me drive you home._

_Wait._ “Wait,” he says, and his voice is a whisper. Half of what it was. He’s half of what he was. Half here, half in a bag on his lap, half on a… “I want to see her. I can see her, I need to see… I need to see, she needs me, I promised—” But they pull him away.

And he’s lost, so he follows.

 

* * *

 

Emily’s no traditionalist, but she’ll be damned if this dance doesn’t happen.

“Get your ass out there and dance with your daughter,” she says, shoving Spencer out onto the empty dancefloor, Elliott cackling in his arms. “Morgan, if you fuck up filming this one thing, I’m going to make you eat that camera.”

“I’m not a good dancer,” Spencer protests. There’s an outcry from the people watching. “Awh, Em…”

“Come on, Reid,” Hotch says, leading Jack out onto the floor next to him. “We’re never going to hear the end of it otherwise.”

“Is it cheating if I just take JJ out there?” Will is laughing, his hand on JJ’s belly, but Emily’s not listening because the music has lifted, Spencer is silently swaying along with Elliott cuddled against his chest, and they’re both entirely focused on each other. There’s a smile on his face that’s soft and stunned all at once, as though he’s once again marvelling that there could be anything that he loves more than the girl in his arms. Wide hands tighten around her, fingers scrunching the tough material of the dress she’s wearing, and Emily can see Elliott’s mouth moving as she babbles. Can’t hear what she’s saying but, shit, with this kid, it could be anything.

She inches through the crowd, working her way closer to the small throng of parents trying to teach their children to dance, hungrily wanting to know the secret words passing between her husband and daughter right now. Jack is dancing wonderfully, completely trusting of his father to lead him unerringly. She gets closer. Can’t hear them still as the song comes to a close, but she can read lips well enough to realize. They’re not talking. Elliott, maybe, but Spencer’s not. He’s singing… very softly singing to her, with Elliott parroting his words out of tune with the music and occasionally stopping to giggle.

_There could never be a father loves his daughter more than I love you._

“Oh,” she says, and stops. Stunned. There’s something heavy and bursting in her chest that she can’t speak around; covering her mouth to stop from making a noise that betrays it. A hand touches her arm, draws her close against a warm, firm body that hugs her tightly.

“Let’s go, there’s still a minute left,” Rossi murmurs, and draws her out onto the floor, ignoring her tears. Spencer and Elliott both turn to look at them, beaming. “I’ve never gotten to dance with a daughter before. Let an old man have this pleasure.”

She lets him because she wants it to. This. All of this.

Always.

 

* * *

 

“Dr. Reid?” Carly looks scared. Worried. She knows something is wrong. Has known it for days. Reid stares blankly at her, standing in his kitchen, looking past her to Emily’s mug upside down on the sink and thinking, _what happens now?_ _What happened then?_

He remembers waking up to Elliott bouncing on their bed. _Hi, baby,_ Emily had murmured. _What’s that you have there?_

_It’s a Syringa vulgaris,_ Elliott had announced proudly, holding out the purple flower. _I looked it up. It’s a lilac, Mama._

_Where did you get that?_ Emily’s voice. Sharp. Scared.

_It was on my windowsill. Why? What’s wrong? Mama? Mama?_

Emily had run. To protect them. Left this home and that mug and this life and his heart.

“Dr. Reid? You’re scaring me.”

Elliott’s not home. Pre-school. She’s at pre-school. Hotch is behind him. Hotch will know what to do.

_She’s gone and you don’t even know the name of the man who took her,_ screams the abandoned mug. Reid looks at it again. She won’t drink from it again.

She won’t drink again.

“You can go home, Carly,” he says blankly. “Thank you.”

He should get Elliott. Bring her home. He walks to her room, finds her coat. It’s cold outside. It’s spring. Emily loves spring.

Loved.

Someone is crying down the hall. Hotch must have told Carly. _I should have done that,_ Reid thinks, and sits down heavily on Elliott’s bed, knocking over her stuffed cat. It thumps on the floor, one paw over its button eye. _She’s our employee. Mine. Sorry. Sorry._

The shadows shift and someone touches his face, his hand.

“Daddy?”

Elliott. Hotch is behind her, her bag hanging from his hand and his eyes huge and scared. In Reid’s hands, the cat is soft. He fiddles with the bow around its neck, tied there two years before by Emily to cover a small tear. Its name changes on the regular.

“What’s your cat’s name today?” he asks his daughter. Elliott’s eyes slide to the cat and back to him, her skin grey with fear. Her hair is neatly brushed. Carly had dressed her beautifully this morning—white stockings, barely scuffed black shoes, a purple coat that’s a brighter mirror of her mother’s—just how Emily would have dressed her, if she was here. There’s a rabbit clip in her hair. _How do I do that?_ he wonders, looking at her braid. _I need to do that now._

“Sergio,” Elliott whispers, and presses close, her knees knocking against his. She’s tall, for an almost-four-year-old. She climbs on his lap anyway, knocking the cat aside and huddling against his chest. “Why are you sitting on my bed? Why did Uncle Aaron come get me? It’s pizza night. Are we having pizza? Is Mama home yet?”

He opens his mouth. He goes to say it. _She never made it off the table._

_Your mama is dead._

_Emily is dead._

_We’re alone._

“Oh god,” he says, and it hits. It’s crushing. _Impact._ “Aaron, help me.”

Almost assuredly fatal.

 

* * *

 

They’re drunk and silly and Emily’s never been more in love. More in love with JJ and the baby she carries; she’s curled around Will in the corner of the reception and they’re kissing in a way that makes Emily look around for Spencer. More in love with Spencer as he whirls slowly around the dancefloor in a giddy circle with his mom in his arms, both beaming with the joy of the day.

More in love with her team. Hotch is dancing with Garcia. He’s not drunk or, if he is, he’s hiding it. On every turn, his eyes skim the room. He checks on them, all of them. His team. His family. Unconsciously, without realizing, he’s still looking after them. Maybe he can’t help it. He hasn’t lost his suit jacket yet, but it won’t be long until he sheds that and finally lets himself just _be_.

Rossi’s laugh is audible. He’s attracted an audience, telling a story that’s lewd and almost certainly going to get him in trouble when Hotch notes that the most rapt listener is Jack with Elliott in his lap, both children with their fingers tangled and mouths hanging open with glee.

Morgan dances alone, but not sadly. Not morosely. He manages to make himself a part of every dancer he swings by, a touch here, a guiding hand there. He’s vibrant, alive, thrilled with this moment. Sometimes, his gaze lands on Will and JJ or Reid or even Emily herself and he looks sad. But only for a moment. Then he bounds away and he’s in the moment again, living for what’s happening now and only now. Bursting with pride and delight and she thinks, maybe, he might have finally forgiven them for a night almost two years ago in a shoddy staff bathroom.

It’s a bright, silly night, and she thinks that no matter what happens in the future, no matter what comes their way, they’ll always have this.

She’s never been more in love with being alive.

 

* * *

 

Her funeral takes place on a blue day. A bright, sunny day with the sky the same blue as the day Elliott was born. _Two months till her fourth birthday_ , Reid thinks, looking down at Elliott’s pale face and odd black dress instead of her usual bright medley. She clings to his hand. She’s confused. Confused by the tears, the graves, the coffin. He’s confused too. He tightens his grip.

JJ hovers. Holds his other hand. His shoulders are shaking but he’s not crying, he can’t find the energy. He’s just. Nothing. Will is holding JJ’s other hand, so they’re a strange, straggling line of misery in this bright, fucking shit shiny day.

He’s never going to feel quite the same way about blue again, and he’s glad Elliott’s room is yellow.

Morgan helps bear the coffin, and then he helps bear Reid when he falls. Garcia is crying. Great, gasping, heaving sobs and Elliott looks at her and scrunches her face up, eyes ticking constantly, brain whirring, trying to process. Hotch looks… shell-shocked. Pale. He never once looks at the coffin. At the photo resting on top. Jack isn’t there. Of course he isn’t. He’d buried his mom; Hotch wouldn’t expose him to the burial of someone else’s.

Hotch looks at Reid the whole time, and his gaze never wavers.

Rossi is…

Broken.

He carries his grief silently. Resolutely. But it bears on his shoulders, drags his mouth downwards, makes him look old and tired and bleached dry by the relentless sun. Elliott looks at him, tilts her head. Then back at the coffin her sharp gaze ticks.

“Daddy,” she says suddenly, and her voice is shrill. He jolts. She hasn’t spoken yet, today, beyond asking where they’re going and if she can have pancakes for breakfast and why is grandma making her wear her itchiest dress. Why is grandma crying. “Mama’s in there.”

Reid freezes. JJ turns, crouches, goes to say something. Elliott tugs away towards the coffin. Everyone is looking at them. Hazel eyes turn to stare up at him, huge. Betrayed. Furious with all the indignation of an almost-four-year-old suddenly realizing that something in her life is horribly, horribly wrong and Daddy isn’t fixing it. Should be fixing it. Daddy can fix _anything_ , so the only reason he isn’t is because he won’t, for whatever reason.

“Mama’s in there and if you bury her, she can’t come back,” Elliott demands. Reid breaks just that little more. “You have to _stop_. Please!”

Rossi sucks in a rattling breath and, in the silence that follows, he begins to cry.

After a beat, Reid does too.

 

* * *

 

There’s a thousand things to do. They’re flying Diana back to Vegas and then they’re flying to Greece. Reid had winced and grumbled at the idea of a honeymoon away, but she’d reminded him pertly that, if anything, Athens _does_ have a gorgeous library. That had seemed to settle the argument. But now, there’s packing—packing for herself and for the man who thinks that packing for a honeymoon is much as the same as packing a go-bag—and passports and making sure Elliott is okay and making sure Carly is okay and making sure—

“Ma’am, we’re going to be just fine, I promise,” Carly reassures her. Elliott just looks bored. Separation anxiety is, thankfully, _not_ one of her wonderful—Emily likes to refer to them as wonderful so she doesn’t tear her hair out over them—quirks. “We’re going to be fine. Ellie?”

“Bye bye, Mama,” Elliott says, waving despite them having another three hours before they need to be at the airport. “Bye bye, Dada.”

“Aw, is she trying to get rid of us?” Spencer says, pouting and padding out of the bedroom with his toothbrush in his mouth and no shoes on. “And after all the careful raising we’ve done. Guess she’s yours now, Carly.” Carly titters, still awkward around them despite being in their employ since Elliott was six months old, and leads the child to the kitchen for lunch.

“She’s going to be okay, right?” Emily says, settling her hand on the small of Spencer’s back and guiding him back into the bedroom and towards his shoes.

“Carly?” Spencer mumbles around the toothbrush. “Well, I should think that was a question we should have asked two years ago when we hired her. Bit out of luck now if she’s not.”

He’s being a cheeky shit, and she scowls at him. “Elliott, you idiot. We’re gone two weeks. That’s… a long time to be leaving her. I’m worried.”

“JJ’s taking her for three days for a sleepover,” Spencer reassures her, leaning back into her hand and rolling his toothbrush around in his mouth, smiling through it at her. “Your mom will be here next week to take her. She adores her nanny. Are you worried about how she’s going to cope, or are you worried about you’re going to?”

There’s no real way to respond to that except, “Oh, shut up.”

“Love you too,” he says, toothbrush clicking against his teeth, and she throws his shoes at him.

 

* * *

 

And time passes.

_Bereavement leave,_ they give him, and he thinks that it’s possibly the worst thing they could have. He’s never dealt well with being alone and alone is all he is now. It’s fine while Elliott is there. She’s rocked at her core, shattered by her mama bring gone. Even her brain struggles to comprehend how fully and completely death can take someone. Someone who was there, now gone. She doesn’t understand. He doesn’t either, and he doesn’t know how to help her. He wishes he believed in _more_. Wishes there was some kind answer he could give her.

But he doesn’t, and he can’t, so they cling together alone in the empty house, and he finds so many pitfalls that he’s never been aware of before. Their life is littered with them now. It’s a thousand cuts and every one leaves him bleeding, a little less. Less of a person, less able to help buoy up the daughter that Emily’s left him to raise alone.

It’s a phone call from a mercenary salesperson asking if, _Mrs. Reid is there,_ and he wants to snarl, _no because she never took my name,_ and he wants to snarl, _no,_ because how dare he ask for her when Elliott and Reid should be first in line to want her and he wants to scream, _yes,_ and hand the phone across to her and smile and laugh and for it to be okay.

It’s him not having the knack of talking Elliott into letting him brush her wild hair. It’s arguing with her for forty minutes until she’s late for pre-school and on the verge of tears. It’s throwing the brush onto her bed and walking out of her room to curl up on the couch with his knees to his chest and struggling to breathe through the pain of it all. It’s Elliott walking in sobbing ten minutes later, shoving the brush into his hands and begging him to, _stop crying, Daddy, stop crying, I’m sorry I was bad, you can brush it now, please brush it._

It’s trying to braid it, failing, and Elliott frowning and murmuring, _it’s not like Mama does it_.

It’s giving up and keeping her home, because he’s not ready to let her leave his sight anyway.

A closet half-filled with her clothes and scent. Sleeping on the couch to avoid an empty bed. Waking up with Elliott cuddled next to him, her face sticky with tears. Muddy shoes by the front door. Mail addressed to her. Her favourite foods that he and Elliott don’t like sitting in the fridge, unopened. Elliott finding one of Emily’s old woolly hats and refusing to take it off. It’s suddenly being solely responsible for the memories shared between them, because he’s the only one left to remember. And it’s knowing he’s failing. It’s her slipping away, day by day.

And it’s the longing for it all to stop.

 

* * *

 

The panic, when it comes, is not entirely unexpected. He bites his lip. Shuffles his feet. Looks at her, looks away, looks back at her through his lowered lashes. Hums.

“Oh my god, I’m going to send you down to cargo,” she hisses, lowering her book and looking at him. “What?!”

“Maybe we should come back early,” he says after a beat. “Long periods of separation before the third year can have a detrimental impact on her ability to form attachments in later life.”

“Spencer,” she says firmly, and leans closer to him until their noses are almost touching. The plane rumbles around them. _Too late to panic now,_ she thinks wryly. “She’s not going to have daddy issues. We are _fine_.”

“Yes, yes, good,” he murmurs, sinking low in his seat. “But… we should call when we land. In case she… misses us.” Emily would put good money on it not being Elliott doing the missing.

But…

“Okay,” she agrees, almost too quickly, refusing to meet his eyes when he smirks knowingly at her. “But we’re teaching her to be clingy and it’s absolutely your fault.”

 

* * *

 

The impact, when it comes, is catastrophic.

“You should have a day to yourself,” Carly suggests shyly, still uneasy around him alone. He nods because he knows his quiet vacantness is beginning to grate on his daughter’s need to heal. He leaves them there with a pile of new puzzles he’d brought the week before because he’d thought they could do them together and then realized they couldn’t because of the person missing.

The city is alive. Springtime. There are families, couples. Children. He tries not to watch them, but they’re all he can see.

And he’s drowning.

There’s a letter in his pocket. He doesn’t know how to dress Elliot like Emily used to. Does his best but Elliott grumbles and says he’s matching the wrong shirt with the wrong pants and that dress is for Tuesdays, Daddy, duh. It’s just easier to… step back. Let her dress herself. Sometimes that means jeans under a dress patterned with bunnies over three shirts because, _I was cold,_ and with one of Emily’s old knitted hats to complete the ensemble. She walks out into the kitchen, smiles like nothing is wrong in her world, and he can’t bear to tell her differently. So he takes her like that, and she comes home with a letter inviting him to speak to the therapist about whether Elliott is _coping_.

She’s not. Her hair is unbrushed more often than it’s not. He can’t braid it, she won’t let him brush it, she doesn’t like how he cuts her sandwiches despite never having had a problem before. If she’s not happy, she’s pin-wheeling straight to sobbing, and he can’t keep up with her. If he tries, she uses Emily against him like a knife, with all the vicious skill of an almost-four-year-old potential genius hurting more than she had ever imagined possible, and he can’t stop her without letting her know he’s hurting too. _Mama did it better. When’s Mama coming home? I don’t want **you** to read my story tonight, I want Mama to. _

_I wish Mama was here instead of you. You’re **mean**._

He’s drowning, and he’s dragging her down with him. He just needs a moment. Just a moment. To catch his breath, to think things through. To _stop_.

Falling, once he’s made up his mind to, is supremely easy to begin and impossible to end.

 

* * *

 

He’s sprawled under her, arching up with a breathy _ah_ and she arches with him. Third day in Athens, they’re tired, sunburnt, and supremely alive.

“Sick of this yet?” she gasps, wincing, a little bit sore on top of everything else. They’re really testing his gloating about his refractory period and, so far, the bastard was absolutely correct to gloat. _Bastard._

“Sex with my not-secret-anymore-wife?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow, and rolls her over with a _thump_ and a yelp, slipping out. “Oh, never.”

Unsuccessfully trying to regain the upper hand, she lets herself fall limp, wiping her hand over her sweaty forehead and then wiping that hand across his equally sweaty chest. “You’re a ho.”

A smile is her answer, smug and sweet all at once. “And you’re gorgeous,” he says, sliding back into her with a smooth stroke and a soft grunt. “Who could blame me?”

“Can’t wait to get you back to the States,” she grumbles, lifting her hips to help him as he fumbles slightly and almost elbows himself in the nose. Automatically responding to his gawkiness is second nature by now, even as he tries to avoid his elbow and instead sneezes with surprise. “You’re better behaved there. Also, what the fuck, Spence?”

He buries his nose in the linen next to her, still inside her and hunched over, giggling helplessly. “I’m me,” he argues, still giggling. “Did you know the smell of pumpkin is sometimes used as an aphrodisiac?”  But she forgives him, because he brings her hand to his mouth, kissing her ring twice, and there’s really no staying mad.

 

* * *

 

He puts his daughter to bed, kisses her twice despite her ignoring him, and tugs the door shut between them. He’s confident she won’t come to him during the night. It’s been weeks since she last has. It’s been weeks since she’s spoken to him at all beyond anger, showing a remarkable level of focus in holding grudges for her age. Not overly surprising. She’s always been focused, and this is a superlative betrayal of his, this taking Emily from her.

He’s confident in this, and even if he wasn’t, he’s too hurt, too broken, too desperate to stop. Too. Nothing. Nothing without her. Not a father, not like he should be. Not a husband, not anymore. Not a friend, because he’s ignoring all their phone calls and refuses to answer the door. Emily’s a month cold in the ground, and he can’t let them see how he’s already failed her.

How could she do this to them?

It was never meant to end like this.

There’s never been any doubt in his mind that, if one of them was to die, it absolutely had to be him. He can’t live without her, and Emily was too strong to give up just because of something so mundane as a broken heart. But he’s not Emily. He’s not Emily, he’s not strong, and he’s not the one who’s dead.

The _snick_ of his bedroom door locking is like a promise. Just for tonight. Just to sleep without dreaming of her. Just to stop.

When he’s sober, she haunts him.

At least until he finds his oblivion, and then he thinks of nothing at all.


	6. The Resurgence

Sometimes she hears noises in the night time, and things are different now. Not like they used to be. The _noises_ are different. It used to be that when Elliott was scared, when there were noises whispering or haunting or sneaking about, Mama would frown at the noises and laugh until they went away. If Mama didn’t, she’d smile, that secret kind of smile that she only ever gave Daddy and Daddy would explain _why_ the noises weren’t really noises at all, but pipes or foundations or the neighbours being ‘bothers’.

But things are different now. Things change, Elliott’s learned this, and Mama’s gone away. Put in the box and buried deep, and Elliott’s done all kinds of reading to try and understand this and she knows the one thing that isn’t gonna change is that Mama’s never coming back home.

So the noises are noises again—maybe the scary kind—and she does nothing but listen because noises can take Mamas away and maybe, just maybe, they can take Daddies too.

“See what it is, you might feel better,” Elliott says out loud, just to hear the words. Carly taught her lots of songs like this, to help when she’s feeling too much. Which is a lot. There are a lot of feelings and not enough Elliott to think about them all, sometimes. But it’s hard to explain like that. “See… what it is…”

Mama would be brave. Mama would get a flashlight and sneak around until the noises went away. So, because Mama is gone and Daddy is sad, Elliott has to be brave. And see what it is.

Maybe she’ll feel better if she does.

She sits up, quickly, because if she does it fast there’s no time to be scared. Everything is dark. Her room doesn’t even look like her room in the dark… it’s full of strange shapes that could be an arm or a hand or a something reaching towards her and—

She sucks in a deep breath and sinks down into the blankets again. She’s gonna cry. She doesn’t want to. She wants Daddy. Doesn’t want to call him near the noise. Wants Mama. Knows things are different, so she can’t have her.

“Once you see what’s there,” she mumbles into her blankets. It’s scary scary and she wants her Daddy and there’s a _bang_ and a noise down the hall that’s _not_ her imagination, it’s not, and so she screams and _jumps_ from her bed to the door and runs down the hall to the where there’s light and her Daddy and—

He’s not in the living room. He’s _always_ in the living room. She stops and stares at the empty couch.

The noise has got him. The noise has took him away. Just like Mama.

And it’s gonna come for her next.

She screams. Again and she doesn’t stop because someone will come, before the noise, someone has to and she screams and screams and screams until she can’t breathe and—

Hands grab her. “No!” she shrieks, turning around and hitting those hands, the shape, kicking, howling, she’s crying, and they don’t let go, they don’t, she can’t breathe—

“Shh, Ellie, love, shh.” It’s Daddy and he pulls her close, holds her hands, hugs her tight and she’s sobbing now, like a real baby, like those babies at school. “Oh, love, it’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here.”

She’s gulping and hiccupping and might be sick, and he’s hugging her too tight. The words are hard but she manages them; “Hugging too tight, Daddy,” she says, and tries to wiggle away. He clings tighter. He’s _heavy_. She pushes him.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and his knees _clonk_ on the floor. He’s just sitting there. On the floor, looking down. Looking tired, like he should go to bed but doesn’t want to. “Nightmare?”

She studies him some more. His words sound strange. Not… like Daddy. “Are you sick?” she asks. “Does your head hurt?” Sometimes her head hurts and her voice sounds like that and then she pukes and it feels better. She hopes he’s not gonna puke.

“No, I’m fine,” he says, but he says it like ‘mm’fun’ and she gets told off when she mumbles like that. ‘Enunciate, Elliot,’ Daddy tells her, but she doesn’t think she should say that right now. “Come on, back to bed.” And this is the bit where he takes her to bed, tucks her in, kisses her. Just like he used to, before he put Mama in the box and sent her away.

“We go to my room now,” she reminds him, because he’s still just sitting there, and he swallows so hard she hears it. “Daddy, you’re sick.” She crouches next to him, shuffling close, and presses her hand to his head, just like Mama does when she doesn’t feel well. He leans against it. His eyes close. Is he going to sleep on the floor?

“Fuck,” he says, and he doesn’t mumble _that_ at all. Um mah.

“You have to justify your cuss,” she says, because that’s what he says to her, but he doesn’t and now she’s scared again but for a different reason. Can being sick take Daddies away the same as noises take Mamas?

He takes her hand and stands. It takes him two goes, and she giggles once because he looks funny falling over, but… it’s not funny, not really. He’s not got a shirt on, just his jammy pants, but he looks all sweaty. “Come on,” he says, in that funny voice, and holds her hand too tight. It hurts but he doesn’t listen when she tugs it away. “I… come on.” They’re walking the wrong way. Her bedroom is the other way. They’re walking to _his_ bedroom. His TV is on and Mama is on it in a pretty dress. Not moving, just there stopped. Elliott whimpers, digging her heels in, but he lifts her onto the bed and almost falls. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and kisses her. Presses his cheek against hers and his face is wet and gross. “Sorry, baby, sorry, sorry, so goddamn sorry.”

“Why?” she whispers, and he’s not answering. Just reaching for his phone. “Who are you ringing? It’s dark.” Phones only ring after dark if Mama, or very sometimes Daddy, have to go away. _They’re_ never the ones calling people to go away. “Are you gonna go someplace?”

He looks at her weird again, holding the phone to his ear. His hands are shaky. “JJ,” he says into the phone, suddenly, and now _he’s_ crying again and why why why, Elliott _hates_ when things don’t make sense and _none_ of this makes sense and she doesn’t know _why_. “I… help. Please help. I fucked up.”

 

* * *

 

Things get better. There’s a night that’s terrible, so terrible that Reid can’t think about it without having to stop to catch his breath, and then things… get better. Slowly. Slowly slowly, but they _do_ get incrementally better. And, contrary to his belief, there’s not a single person who looks at the shambles he’s made of this all and walks away. Despite the fact that they should. Despite the fact that _he_ would, and he’s beginning to suspect that he’s harder on himself than anyone else is.

“How is she?” asks Hotch one Sunday as Reid helps peel potatoes. This happened, somehow. Reid isn’t sure when or how, but in the hazy time period between those seven fatal words and now, Sunday dinners at Hotch’s with Elliott and Jack shrieking together in the other room have become a regular thing. Reid looks at his daughter through the shiny-bright glass of Hotch’s back door, watching her chase Jack in endless, sporadic circles, both their arms up and clearly deep in some complex game that the likes of their fathers can never hope to fully comprehend.

“She’s obsessed with death,” he says, because he always starts with the most interesting lead in and this new obsession, while possibly something he _should_ be disconcerted by, is really quite a fascinating insight into his daughter’s strange little world. “I took her to the zoo with JJ and Henry and all she wanted to do was watch the carnivores being fed. She can also list in startling detail all the stages a body goes through when decomposing.” He doesn’t mention the dead bird she’d brought home from school, or the fact that instead of crying when her fish had died, she’d merely sat quietly in front of the tank and examined it studiously.

He also doesn’t mention the fact that, upon finding her examining the dead fish, he’d simply joined her. It seemed like some kind of bonding experience, as odd as it had been. And the anomalous amount of information he’s gathered over the years on marine life _had_ to come in handy eventually.

Hotch’s eyebrows lift. “That’s normal though?” he asks, paused with the pasta. “After a loss?”

Reid shrugs. The peeler slips to skim down his finger and he hisses, accepting the paper towel Hotch flicks him to daub at the thin scrape. “We’re making a scrapbook,” he adds, because this is far less interesting than his daughter’s desire to learn everything about a particular subject, no matter how macabre. “Her therapist suggested it. Says it will help us… both.”

Hotch smiles, but he aims the smile at the pasta and it’s a sad, muted kind of expression. “That’s good,” he murmurs, tilting his jaw away. “Emily would…” He trails off. The room seems now empty and cold, except for two lonely men hovering over a pile of bloodied potato peels.

“I know,” Reid says, and sucks on the sore finger. “I know, Aaron.”

 

* * *

 

Daddy’s gone to sleep when there’s a knock on the door. “Daddy,” Elliott says, and shakes his shoulder. “ _Daddy_.”

But he just keeps sleeping.

His phone rings loud and makes her jump. Daddy’s being sleepy, so she answers it like he does: “Reid.”

There’s a startled laugh from the other end. “Ellie, sweetie, can I talk to your dad?” It’s Auntie JJ.

Elliott chews on her lip. “Um, no.”

“Oh, okay. Can you tell him to open the door for me, please?”

She shakes Daddy again, just in case, but his head flops a little and his eyes stay shut. He’s gonna be in trouble. “I can tell him,” she says slowly, because she doesn’t want him to be in trouble.

Quiet for a moment, and the phone rattles like Auntie JJ just blew a big breath against it. “Okay, hon, I need you to come open the door, can you do that? You might need to get a chair, but I _need_ you to open it.” She does, not being scared this time because all the lights are on now and Auntie JJ is just outside. Just like Mama showed her how, in case there was a fire; first the big bolt and then the latch, and the chain is last.

“Hi,” Elliot says when the door opens to let in her aunt, and then bursts into tears. She doesn’t really know why she’s crying or sad just that she _is_ and she wants it to _stop_. Arms wrap around her, picking her up and cuddling her close. Auntie JJ doesn’t hug too tight like Daddy and she doesn’t smell like she needs a bath either. She smells clean, like shampoo, and a little like Mama, so Elliott hugs back.

“Where’s your daddy?” Auntie JJ asks her.

Elliott turns her head a little, wiping her nose and eyes and says, “In bed, sleeping. He’s sick.”

“Yes, he is,” says Auntie JJ, real serious, and puts Elliott down on the couch. “Stay here, okay? Here, have a blanket and just snuggle down.”

Elliott stays because Auntie JJ asked her to, but she can still hear the talking. They’re not shouting like Elliott does when she fights with Michael at school, but they _are_ fighting, she can tell. The words are angry. So, she sneaks closer, the blanket wrapped around her. She can’t hear Daddy’s voice, but Auntie JJ’s she can hear just fine.

“How _could_ you? With your daughter in the house? Do you have more? Don’t… don’t _look_ at me like that. Just tell me where you keep it. Of course, I don’t believe you— _look_ at you. What am I supposed to do now, Spence? How do I fix this?”

She’s crying, Elliott realizes, and presses her hands to her tummy because it _hurts_ to hear Auntie JJ cry. Daddy’s crying too. They’re both crying, so Elliott slides in through the door and peeks. Auntie JJ is staring at the TV, at the stop-picture of Mama in her pretty dress, and Daddy is sitting on the end of the bed with his head in his hands.

“Daddy, can I have a hug?” she asks, and they both jump and look at her.

“Of course, love,” he says, holding a hand out, so she runs fast and leaps into his lap, too hard, and he makes a rough kind of _ow_ noise. “Always. You just have to ask.”

“I don’t know what comes next,” Auntie JJ says, leaning down and hugging them too. “I just don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” mumbles Daddy, and closes his eyes again.

 

* * *

 

Her birthday is a bright spring day and, also, a turning point.

They’re at the park as she solemnly explains that, _bread isn’t good for ducks because of their dictative systems—that’s ‘digestive systems’, Ellie—that’s what I said,_ and he has the brand-new scrapbook spread open across his knees, half-heartedly sketching what almost looks like a duck in the margins. She has a glue stick in one hand and a handful of grass in the other and a focused enough expression on her face that Reid just knows no matter how terrible his duck sketch is, it’s not going to matter because it’ll all be grass in the end.

“Where do ducks go when they die?” she asks, pausing with the glue at a curious angle to her face. It takes two glances for him to work out exactly where she’s considering sticking it. “What does glue taste like?”

“They decompose using fungi, insects, and bacteria into much simpler matter in order to recycle finite physical matter,” he answers offhand, eyeing the glue-stick carefully. “And probably an unearthly mix of acrylic polymer and sodium stearate. Don’t eat the glue, El.”

“But it’s my birthday. And I want to know what everything ever tastes like.”

It’s not _really_ toxic, but he doesn’t really want to set a precedent. “It’ll make your tongue sticky.”

She doesn’t seem sure if that makes it more or less appealing, but it does seem to lose some of its mystery. “Where do baby ducks go when they die?”

Uh oh. She’s specifying.

“Same process,” he murmurs, and uses his hand to try and rescue a bug from the gluggy trails of glue Elliott has left across the page. The bug wriggles twice and stops, forever a part of this memory now. Reid winces at its fate.

“And mama ducks? Do they decompose as well?”

He swallows once and almost chokes on it. “Yes.”

“Hmm.” She hums, decorating the end of the glue stick with flakes of dirt and grass, before saying very softly, “I’m gonna decompose one day. Will you put me in a box too?”

There’s… no good way to answer this one. Accepting the gluey leaf she offers him and placing it carefully in the centre of the page, he says, “Do you want to be put in a box? There are other options.”

It delves into a conversation that’s probably far too detailed for Emily to approve of, but she’s hardly here to disapprove anymore. The bright spring day becomes a brisk spring twilight, and he hands her the pen so she can sign _Elliott ER, 4 year Old today,_ underneath his careful, _Elliott would like a Tibetan Sky Burial and has also learned today that wanting to know what glue sticks taste like is not worth having a sticky tongue._

It’s a good day, a normal day, and he almost forgets to be sad.

 

* * *

 

They’re making her have a stayover at Auntie JJ’s. _You can play with Henry_ , Auntie JJ says, smiling too much, and Elliott is nervous. Nervous because no one has said Daddy is coming and Daddy is moving slowly and looks _really_ sick now, and if she goes away, who’s gonna look after him?

“I don’t have to go if I don’t wanna, right?” Elliott asks Daddy as he packs her a bag with too much stuff for an overnight stay and all her favourite things. Daddy just looks sad and adds her cat. She takes it out. He adds it back. He _can’t_ add her cat because he’s putting all her favourite things in the bag and if she takes them all to Auntie JJ’s, will this still be her room when she comes back? “Because I don’t wanna.”

“Want to,” he corrects her, and puts in her favourite book. _Stop_. “Behave, Elliott.”

“I am behaving,” she says, and thinks maybe she should _stop_ behaving just so he sees how good she’s being when she is. “You’re the one not behaving.” His eyebrow goes up and his mouth goes all straight and both of those don’t happen lots and are signs that she should stop and go have quiet time somewhere else, but she charges on because this is… _mean_. “You’re being awful. You wouldn’t wake up and you ringed Auntie JJ in the dark and you cry too much and I think you’re _awful_.” She adds on, “Mama wouldn’t send me away. Mama _loves_ me,” at the end, because it might make him smile and say, _silly, I’d never send you away._

“I do love you,” he says instead, and he’s holding one of her shirts and running his fingers over it like he’s never noticed it before. “I love you more than you can conceptualize, Elliott. And you’re being cruel right now.”

“No, I’m not.” Her eyes are burning again and she sniffs and can taste it. He makes a grumbly growl when she wipes her nose on her sleeve, so she rubs it on her pants.

“You are.” Now his mouth is down, not straight, and she is sorry but not enough to say. “You’re hurting me. Is that your intention? To be hurtful?”

Now she’s red and burning and hot and looking at the ground, and he zips up her bag with an angry yank. “No.”

“Are you going to apologise?”

_No._ She shakes her head. Not while he’s sending her away. This will make him miss her lots and bring her home. Maybe even today. Tomorrow, for sure.

“Do I get a hug?”

Another head shake. She wants to. Almost does. Shuffles her feet and thinks about it, but he’s gotta _miss_ her. He won’t miss her if she hugs him.

He sighs real deep. Stands and walks over to her, bending down and cupping her chin with his big hands, kissing her twice on the head. “Well, I love you,” he says quietly. “And I’m going to be sad that I didn’t get a hug, but I understand why you wouldn’t want to.”

And then he walks out and leaves her with her bag, just standing there.

That’s not really how she thought this would go.

There are more voices in the kitchen. Uncle Dave, she thinks, but… cranky sounding. She slinks out after them, letting her bag bump on the floor behind her.

“—I need to know what I’m in for, JJ, is this the kind of sleepover where we’re going to talk about feelings, or is it the kind where I need to leave my gun at work and the medicine cabinet locked—”

“ _Dave_ ,” Auntie JJ hisses. They’re all looking at Elliott and Daddy as they come in the door.

“I’m not…” Daddy trails off, his eyes darting to Elliott. “That. I’m not that, Rossi. It’s…”

“Yeah, well, you know the stats, Reid,” Uncle Dave says, and he’s not looking Elliott even though he always pays her attention and gives her sweets and she’s uncomfortable and scared and shuffles behind Daddy without actually touching him. “Better than we do. Widowers are the highest risk category, especially under thirty-five. And no one is telling me _why_ you’re coming over, so I’m making assumptions here.”

Daddy says nothing. She thinks about holding his hand, but Auntie JJ is walking towards her and taking her bag and it’s already time to go.

“Bye, Elliott,” says Daddy.

Elliott doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. She’ll see him again soon, when he misses her and comes to get her.

She’s sure of it.

 

* * *

 

They’re trudging home from pre-school on a rare day of Reid getting away early from work, and he’s carrying her bag, his bag, and the scrapbook under one arm when she stops suddenly and almost yanks his shoulder out of its socket.

“What is it?” he says, instead of swearing at the jerk of pain, and peers at the ratty pile of rubbish she’s spotted. It’s warm, getting warmer, and she shuffles her feet on the sun-heated sidewalk.

“That box moved,” she says finally, inching closer, and he grabs her arm quickly before she can throw herself boldly on top of a stray dog or rat or—

Kitten.

“Ah,” he says, staring at the black ball of fur that looks up at them with rheumy eyes and peeps weakly, its gums as savagely white as its tiny fangs.

“Oh!” says Elliott, and turns to look at him too.

Shit.

There’s a long silence as they look at each other. He waits for it. Waits a little longer.

“Do kittens decompose when they die?” she asks, and tilts her head to examine the kitten as it stumbles over with its sides heaving.

All in all, it’s probably not how Emily would have picked out a pet to replace the fish, but he’s half hoping that having something _alive_ around the house might distract Elliott from thinking too much about what isn’t. And it works. Eventually.

 

* * *

 

She waits patiently because Daddy always come back. He’s not like Mama. He won’t leave her. He won’t. He _can’t_.

But he does.

She waits patiently until it’s night time and Auntie JJ has tucked her in into the spare bed that’s way too big and way too scary, and then she waits some more. Because she’s _miserable_ and she knows Daddy must be too so surely, _surely_ , he’s on his way.

Auntie JJ’s house makes different noises than Daddy’s does. She misses the usual noises. She misses her bed. Her toys are pulled tight around her, all under the blanket with paws and tails tucked in so they don’t get cold or lonely, but it’s still not the same. The shadows are different, it smells different, the noises are different, and she _wants_ Daddy.

Maybe he’s gone forever. She was too awful. Too mean. So he left to find someone else who’d hug him goodbye and not be _cruel_. Maybe someone else is already living in their house. A new kid in her bath, playing with her toys, or sitting in the study in Daddy’s office chair and reading the books that smell a little bit like him. Maybe there’s a new Mama opening the drawer next to the bed where Mama’s perfumes and thing she calls ‘trinkets’ are kept, the drawer that rattles nicely when Elliott slips it open and breathes it in to remember what Mama used to smell like when she’d hug her. A new Daddy too.

A new Daddy without her Daddy’s smiles or his big hands that do magic tricks and hold books and hug her tight and his way of telling stories that makes them sound wonderful and real where Mama only makes them sound like stories.

No more magic stories. No more tricks. No more hugs.

“Oh,” Elliott says, and sinks down low in this strange new bed and feels sick, like her chest is all tight and funny. She whispers his name and then she whispers it louder and both times he doesn’t answer and he might never answer and that’s when the sick gets sicker and she can’t scream this time because there’s too _much_. Instead, she tries and tries and just makes _ow_ noises like the time a girl at pre-school fell on a bar and her breathing went all funny.

She stumbles out of the bed, ignoring the strange new shadows, and finds the door, finds the hall, tries to remember which is Henry’s room and which is Auntie JJ’s and instead the sick gets heavier and she curls up instead, pressing her knees into her eyes and trying not to cry.

“Elliott?” says a deep voice and she cries out once because, _Daddy_ , but it’s not, it’s not, it’s Henry’s Daddy and he’s walking towards her and reaching for her and hugging her and it’s not right, it’s not _right_ and she finds her voice then.

“Daddy’s gone,” she says, and the words hurt so much she tucks her knees up more and Uncle Will has to crouch to stop her falling but it doesn’t work because the floor doesn’t feel right anymore; she’s dizzy and sick and going to fall anyway, despite his hands that are _wrong_ holding her up. “Daddy’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone, _he’s gone, likeMamagonegonegone!”_

She screams until she’s sick, actual sick, all over Auntie JJ’s floor and then she screams more because she can’t remember how to stop and behave and she’s sorry and miserable and sore and Auntie JJ’s going to be so mad, and she doesn’t stop sobbing even when the sobs aren’t sounds anymore, just feelings, and Auntie JJ carries her to the car and says words that aren’t words either.

She doesn’t care where they’re going because Daddy’s gone and she doesn’t want to see another box.

 

* * *

 

The second page is movies. Movies he loves, movies Elliott loves, movies Emily loved. Elliott draws and he writes the captions and sometimes they swap. He finds clippings from when the movies aired and they stick them in too, right next to the wonky, _I don’t like the llama lady but I Like the llama,_ that Elliott had spent twenty minutes getting perfect.

The third page, after some thinking, is food. It’s packets of sugar and stirring sticks from the cafes he takes her to. It’s a napkin he drew silly faces on. It’s, with a sick, cold jolt from his neck to his toes, a menu from a certain ice-creamery that takes him ten minutes just to step through the door and looks exactly the same as the last time he’d come here. They sit at a different booth and she doesn’t ask why he’s sad.

The next bundle of pages are books because if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s books. Books on birds, on science, on the body and the brain and places around the world and types of tea. Stories and tales and mysteries.

He makes sure they leave blank pages between, writing carefully at the top, _My Mama_ , and showing her them. “These are for you to fill in,” he says quietly. He leaves her to it and doesn’t look.

_My Friends,_ is condemningly blank, but, _Sergio,_ fills up quickly, mostly with fur and half-chewed balls of foil unwrapped and glued with care. _My Daddy,_ is heavy enough that he has to sturdy the page with duct tape to stop it tearing itself out.

There’s a page she wrote herself, labelled _The Noises_ , and he looks at that for a while and at the scribbled black on the white paper, and eventually gets to work. He cuts out tiny people made of coloured paper and hides them around the apartment, in all kinds of places. Gives her a flashlight and covers all the lights except for one that he keeps on, just in case, and tells her that they’re, _going to hunt all the noises away, just like this._

When they’ve found them all, they stick them in the book too. Noises conquered. Night time rendered safe once more. The paper figures cover the black scribbles and she starts to sleep through the night again.

She still won’t let him brush her hair, so he takes her to the hairdressers and emerges with an Elliott with far less hair and a shell-shocked expression. So she doesn’t feel left out, he gets his cut short too and buys them both new woolly hats for the winter. She still doesn’t like how he dresses her, so he gives JJ his bank card and tells them both to deal with it.

The letters stop coming home.

He does better.

 

* * *

 

“Come on,” Auntie JJ says. Elliott is too tired to do more than hiccup as warm arms tug around her neck, undoing her seatbelt and lifting her from her car seat. “Oh, sweetheart. You’re all hot and flushed.”

It’s cold outside the car. Cold and Elliott just wants to curl up and not be Elliott anymore, so she pulls away from the hand that wipes at her sticky cheek and pulls hair away from her face. Cold, but she feels hot, and sick, and she can still smell vomit and yuck and her head aches. Then she’s being carried. Grass swishes below them. Wet grass. Dark grass. Elliott stares at it with her head on Auntie JJ’s shoulder, and she hears a door bang open and more swishing, faster.

“Elliott,” says a voice, a voice she knows, and _now_ she looks up.

“Daddy?” she says, or tries, and it _is_ her Daddy. Standing on the grass in his jammies and his dressing gown, and he’s _there_. “Daddy!”

It’s a second to leap from Auntie JJ’s arms to his and a forever for his arms to close around and pull her against him. And he smells like him and he feels like him and his hands are right and _oh_. Hugging too tight again but, it’s okay, she’s hugging too tight too.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she’s sobbing, and he’s lifting her up and walking back towards the house, towards Uncle Dave standing in the doorway. “I’m never gonna be cruel again and you can’t go away in the box because I don’t want a new Daddy, I just want _you_ , please please _please_.”

They’re in the house, in the bathroom, and he lets her perch on the bath and cling to his stomach as he wets a face cloth and wipes her cheeks, the right kind of cold and helping her hurting head.

“Did you bring her clothes?” he’s asking Auntie JJ, “She needs a change. Oh, Elliott, love, it’s okay, shh. Shh sh, it’s okay—I’m never going to leave you, okay? I’ll always come back. I’m sorry you were so scared, I’m so sorry, but I messed up, I made a terrible mistake, and I’m going to do so much better from now on.”

She rubs her nose with her hand and he doesn’t even scold. Just wipes her hands with the cloth and eases her arms up to tug her yucky jammy top over her head, resting the cold cloth on her chest where it helps with the sick that’s still there and hurting.

“It’s not cos I was cruel?” she asks, biting at her lip and feeling her face go all twisty and awful. “It’s not cos I made you sad?”

“Never. _Never_. You could never hurt me so much I’d leave you, I love you far, far too much.”

Hiccupping and tasting burning in her mouth, she grabs his shoulders and pulls him down for another hug, digging her fingers into his shirt. “But Mama left,” she says, confused, “and Mama loved me too.” It doesn’t make sense.

He’s quiet and his throat moves funny against her shoulder. Her head hurts. She wants to sleep. There’s a clean top in his hands and she wants that too, hates being smelly and gross. “Mama would have stayed forever if she had the choice,” he says, finally, and his eyes are shut like the words hurt to say. “But she couldn’t. So, I have to stay twice as long to make up for her, okay?”

That… makes sense. She can’t have Mama, so she gets Daddy for longer. Forever even, she figures. Like not eating as much dinner so she can have twice as much ice cream. “Okay,” she agrees, and lets him go.  She sleeps curled up in his arms in a big strange bed without any of her toys, but it’s okay.

She feels safe anyway.

 

* * *

 

It’s a grey, awful day, and he takes Elliott to her mama’s grave.

He should have done it a long time ago. October is blowing in, bringing leaves changing colour and the cold air, and they’re both bundled up in scarves and jackets with Emily’s woolly hat pulled low over Elliott’s pixie cut.

“Fid… ed-lit-ee,” she reads out slowly, shaping the words in her mouth, crouching and reaching out to trace her fingers over the engraving. “Bravery. Integrity. Are those what Mama is?”

He says, _yes,_ despite her being so much more than three words on a headstone, despite her life being more than the line between two dates, but he can’t verbalize any of this. The wind pushes around them greedily, snatching at leaves and unprotected hands and the edges of their clothes, and he wishes he’d seen her grave in the springtime. He loves fall, but hates the leaves on her grave, the last fading wildflowers wilting, the reminder that someone else has been tending to this plot of land with his heart resting within.

It’s his first time here, and he should have come sooner.

“I fell in love with your mama on a day like this,” he says suddenly, the words flinging themselves boldly from his mouth, and maybe this is something else he should have said sooner. Elliott looks at him oddly, flowers in her hands, and settles down on the grave with her knees digging into the wet loam. A new life on an extinguished one. Fucking poetry. He chokes the image down, and says, “A grey, windy, wet day.”

“What were you doin’?” Elliott asks, smiling. It’s a bright, eager smile, and he wonders if he can still smile like that or if the new lines on his face will stop him from trying. He’s twenty-nine this month and he feels four times as old; the stubble he’d shaved from his face last week was tinged with grey and he knows the strain is aging him. Not even thirty and he stands by his wife’s grave and considers growing old.

“Learning to fall,” he answers, finally, and kneels next to her without any regard for his knees. He’s not old yet. He’s not broken yet.

Nowhere near.

 

* * *

 

There’s a noise in the night time.

Sergio is asleep next to her, purring purring, and he jumps awake and stares at the noise. Stares at the door. She hums, tugging the blanket up to her chin and tumbling him between her knees with his claws scritchy scratching on the wool. Daddy left the flashlight next to her bed, on top of their big fat scrapbook with the flowers from Mama pressed underneath. She’s brave now, so she picks it up, sings, “See what it is and you might feel better,” and slips out of bed.

Checks under the bed with the flashlight jumping and her feet cold on the rug. “Boo,” she says to the nothing under there. “Boo,” she says again, checking in the closet. It creaks when she closes and she says, “Boo,” again at the creaky hinge. Then, she turns to her bedroom door.

There’s another noise. A footstep. Oh.

It’s just Daddy. It’s gotta be.

Smiling, she slips over to the door, waits for the footsteps to get closer to Daddy’s room, and then jumps out, “Boo!”

He turns. He has a flashlight too and it makes the thing in his other hand darker in the shadows it leaves. But she knows what it is anyway. Of course she does. Daddy and Mama both sat her down one day and showed her what it was and told her never to touch, not even to play, and that the dark scary end could go _bang_ and kill her full of holes.

“Daddy?” she whimpers, stepping back and almost tripping on Sergio.

The man laughs. Lifts a finger to his mouth. _Shh,_ that finger says, and he raises the gun. It’s not Daddy. It’s not Daddy at all.

The man with the gun steps into her daddy’s room and closes the door between them.

She screams.


	7. The Flight

It’s been nine months since she died to save her family. It’s been nine months since the day JJ and Hotch killed her at her request, because if they hadn’t, Doyle would have left her as the last one standing. It’s always been his intention. Spencer and Elliott dead, and Emily alone.

Penance for Declan.

Almost nine months to the day, she wakes up to messages on their scrabble game. She doesn’t think much of it at the time. Doesn’t think much except how tired she is, as the game boots and the messages slowly load.

_Cheeto-breath: If I asked you to come home, would it be possible…_

_Cheeto-breath: Only if it’s safe_

_Cheeto-breath: I’m sorry Em. I’m so sorry. Spence killed himself last night._

Honestly, she should have realized. There were so many fucking _clues_. At first, there’s just the shock and not much else. But there’s a tiny part of her that whispers _this isn’t right_ , and it’s that part that stays her hand. She doesn’t break cover. She books a flight home under her assumed name. And she absolutely does not do the one thing that will destroy her.

She does not grieve.

Not yet.

_If they know I’m alive, so does Doyle. You can’t tell them._

She stands by this.

 

* * *

 

Elliott is crying. The man is ranting. But Reid’s mind is circling, wheeling, fixated on one singular utterance.

_I was going to kill you like I killed your wife…_

_I killed your wife._

There’s a gun to his head and his daughter watching as he kneels execution style on the bedroom floor, and all he can think about is those four words.

“You don’t need to kill me,” he says, because he was a profiler once and those skills are still in there, somewhere. Buried deep. “Emily is dead. Whatever revenge you have planned—”

The man laughs. Coldly, cruelly, and Reid’s guts drop to his knees. He could die here and he can’t risk making a move without endangering his daughter, frozen in the corner of the room with her face white with shock and mouth gaping soundlessly, eyes locked on him.

The man leans closer. The gun barrel shifts behind his ear, jabs harder, and Reid knows if it goes off there won’t be enough of his skull left to identify him. “You fucking idiot,” the man says, quietly. “She’s not dead. They played us both. And now it’s my turn to play them.”

 

* * *

 

She goes home and the apartment building is as silent as the grave. Silent of those who matter, anyway. She sees neighbours, she sees the everyday bustle of the street, but she doesn’t see her team. She doesn’t see her family. And she doesn’t see anything that tells her one way or the other what is happening here.

Night ticks into the darkest morning, and she sees nothing, her hand on her phone and her old team’s numbers scrawled on a notepad in her pocket. It would take a second to call JJ, to clarify those messages. A second to call Hotch. She stays her hand because if it wasn’t JJ writing those messages, this is very likely a trap. She won’t draw her team into that. Not yet. Not like Tsia.

As it turns out, JJ calls first.

“JJ,” Emily says, answering on the first dull _thrum_ of her cell vibrating. There _is_ a light on in their apartment. It’s been burning all night. She hasn’t seen anyone moving around, but that doesn’t mean anything. Spencer always keeps a light on and, ever since Elliott, he goes to bed when she does even if he doesn’t sleep. She can’t see their bedroom from here. “Is he dead?”

There’s a shocked noise. “Jesus, Emily, where are you?” her friend asks. Emily can hear traffic humming. “I just saw—I didn’t send those messages. He’s not dead. That wasn’t _me_.”

The light flickers out. Emily goes cold.

“I’m home,” she says, and begins to run. “Get here now. Now!”

 

* * *

 

_I was going to kill you like I killed your wife… but I’ve decided it’s far more fun if you kill **yourself**_.

The gun is warmed by his skin. Reid considers his options.

“Tick tock, Dr. Reid. Don’t make me splatter your pretty little girlie with gunk. That’s the kind of thing that creates daddy issues. Then again, daddy issues seem a given considering who her mom is… she’s a wildcat in bed though, isn’t she? I don’t really blame you for knocking her up. Marrying her though? Oh, I _hate_ you for that.”

Reid swallows again. “I won’t do it in front of my daughter,” he says. Elliott makes a harsh kind of choking sound deep in her chest but stays silent. Has been silent since the man first screamed at her to get in here. Has been silent since watching her daddy get pistol whipped across the jaw. _Shock_ , Reid thinks numbly, his face aching. _He’s going to incapacitate me and I can’t stop him. What will happen to her?_

“I’ll let her close her eyes. Hurry up. I have a date with your wife.”

Reid takes the hypodermic with a shaking hand.

He just needs… _time_.

 

* * *

 

The door is open.

Out of all the things Emily has ever feared, ever been afraid of, there’s nothing that’s chilled her more deeply than this open door. She brushes her hand against it and it grates open soundlessly, thumping against the wall. It’s open, and the apartment is silent. Darkness yawns back at her. There’s not a single light on, and that’s horrifying too. Spencer, not in all the time she’s known him, has ever turned off _every_ light.

“JJ,” she says, very quietly, fully aware that she’s unarmed, fully aware that this is a trap with her family in the centre. “Call for help. Now.”

JJ hisses. “Don’t go in there,” she’s saying, and Emily can hear her running. “Em, don’t—”

Emily hangs up. And steps in.

 

* * *

 

_It’s not your poison of choice, but beggars can’t be choosers._

He tries. He _tries_. Clings to himself as his mind begins to scatter with a _rush_ that’s sickeningly strong, and he knows in that instant that he has less than a minute to make his move. It’s pure. It’s stronger than anything he’s taken before, and he’s seven months clean.

He has a minute until total incapacitation.

_Sixty seconds._

In the first ten, he’s frozen waiting for that rush. Frozen staring at his daughter, her eyes scrunched shut at his command. The gun slips away and he thinks, _move, now. Take him down. Get the weapon_ , but it’s not ten seconds anymore, and he blinks and the floor rushes to meet him.

On his side. _Lethal respiratory depression_ , he thinks ( _forty-eight seconds_ ) as he watches Elliott scream and leap towards him in hazy stop-motion. _Disorientation_. An arm catches her mid-jump, heaves her up ( _thirty_ ). _Uncontrollable muscle movements._ He knows from prior experience he’s shaking hard enough that they’re bordering convulsions, and he’s seen enough users to know how terrifying this must look to her. And he knows what he’s waiting for.

The man looks down at him and when Reid blinks again, he’s gone and so is the gun along with all the air in the room.

_Get up._

_Elliott’s gone._

_He’s got her._

**_Get up_**.

( _Ten_ )

He gets up. The world jitters as he moves, too slow, too fast, too undulating. Takes two staggering steps to the door but that’s not right, not yet, and turns and falls and gets back up. Twice more.

Closet. Reaches.

His fingers brush the box. Pushed right up the back. Something in his gut twists and spasms and he gags, tasting bile. Falls again. Catches himself on the shelf and pulls the whole thing down with a crash. The box skids away from his hand, topples over, spilling the contents across the carpet like a kaleidoscope of things that could save his daughter, if only he was strong enough.

( _Zero_ )

* * *

There’s a kitten. It runs away from her, up the dark hall and into Elliott’s silent bedroom, and Emily stares at it. For a moment too long, because it had scared the shit out of her, this one small sign of life.

There’s a cough. It’s a wet sound, almost a gagging sound, and she moves quickly towards it. When she turns on their bedroom light, he’s on the ground looking at her and his eyes have never been more empty.

“Spence?” she asks stupidly, and she can smell vomit and piss and something acrid, and then it hits her. “Oh god.” Two steps to clear the bedroom, and he’s laying half covered in the contents of their closet, not looking at her at all. Looking past her. Dying.

In that moment, she flicks from wife to agent. _Airways first_. He’s vomited, laying on his back; he’s choking on it. It’s the work of a second to roll him to his side, clear his throat, hear that fucking gorgeous sound of air working its way into his lungs again in a rattling heave.

Thumping feet. JJ hurtles in, gun in hand. Stares. “Where’s Elliott?” screams someone, maybe JJ, maybe Emily, maybe some stranger that slipped in while Spencer was dying, and JJ has her cell to her ear as she vanishes back out the room. _Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency,_ and Emily kneels on a wire hanger as she leans down and shakes Spencer until his eyes—pinpoint pupils, pinning further as she watches—focus on her. “Where’s Elliott?” she asks again, and his mouth moves uselessly, the drug dragging him down and away from her.

And Emily knows, _Doyle_ , because this is just his fucking style.

“Box,” Spencer rasps suddenly, his tongue finally obeying him, and his arm jerks grossly outward. “Em. Box…” She’s never been one to ignore him, and she’s not choosing now to start. There’s a shoebox on its side nearby and she’s pretty sure she drags her knee through vomit to get to it, but when she does she’s glad she did.

“Elliott’s not here,” JJ says, as Emily fumbles with Spencer’s arm and slips the syringe into the steady blue of his tensed vein, depressing it slowly. “Hotch is on his way, medics too. Is that Narcan? Is he _high?_ ”

“Doyle,” Emily says, head spinning, pulling the needle free and pressing her thumb to the injection point as every muscle in the body under her hands seems to relax at once. She stares at his eyes as they shutter shut, flick back open, the pupils diluting rapidly. One part of her notes the bloodied smear of the track mark that had almost killed him, alone on the bare skin of his arm. He was clean. He was fucking _clean_. “Doyle did this. He’s taken her. He’s taken Elliott.”

Spencer suddenly twists under her, fighting the drugs in his system to get to his feet. “We have to…” he slurs, shaking his head, falling again, and Jesus fuck, if she could feel anything but fear right now, she’s be thanking him for being _alive_. “I couldn’t. Get to it quick enough. He’s—”

And he stops. Narrows his eyes and turns his head to stare at Emily.

“I’m hallucinating,” he says quite clearly, and passes out in her arms.

 

* * *

 

“No. I’m refusing medical care.”

Hotch reaches for his arm again, but he jerks away, furious. Why are they worrying about _him_? His daughter is gone, missing, _taken_ , and they’re wasting their time with her addict father instead of _finding her_. “Spencer, you’re shaking,” Hotch says. His eyes are worried and Reid hates him in that moments; hates the concern, hates the kindness, hates the fact that he’s here and not chasing Ian Doyle down like a hound pulling down a fox.

The paramedics begin to move away, finally. They can’t force him. He’s signed the statement saying he’s refusing them, he’s had two shots of naloxone, they’ve given him another shot for later when he needs it, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he needs to be up and looking for his daughter, needs his mind _working_ , he’d almost wish he’d taken the bullet.

And nearby. Nearby…

Reid turns on the spot, peering up at the apartment where police are tearing it apart looking for anything that will lead them to Ian Doyle. Peers down at the door where Morgan is standing shell-shocked and pale, Emily at his side.

Emily.

Raging and shouting and frantic to find their daughter and, most of all, alive.

There’s twenty-three feet of space between them and nine months of time, and Reid doesn’t know how to cross either with the weight of her wedding ring around his neck hauling him to the ground.

“We can’t be involved with this investigation,” Hotch says, and _bullshit_ they can’t. Reid turns on him, furious, and Hotch doesn’t flinch. “We can’t be _officially_ involved, Spencer. Are you listening?”

He is.

“You knew about Emily,” he says instead of anything else that’s dancing on his tongue—instead of telling him how much he despises him for this, instead of thanking him, instead of voicing the alluring whisper that points out, _precipitated withdrawal is going to slow you down and you have twenty-four hours before statistically she’s **dead** ; you’ll work better high than you will withdrawing_. “You and JJ.”

“Yes.” The words are heavy and they break something between them. But Emily never would have walked away if she had a choice.

“You know who this man is. This… Ian Doyle.” It’s a statement, not a question, and Reid looks at his hands as he asks it, at the veins and muscles standing out starkly against the skin, cording with the tension thrumming through his body and making every extremity sweat and shake. His head is spinning, his gut aching, he knows he’s going to be ill again, violently ill, and he can’t spare the time to allow it.

“Yes.”

Reid heaves a breath. Shoves those shaking hands in the pockets of the coat Hotch had slipped over his shoulders as he’d sat on the ambulance in nothing but the clean shirt JJ had had the presence of mind to grab him as the police had ushered them out of his home. Their home. Theirs again, maybe, if she stays. If they find her. If they don’t lose something today. “Then you have a profile—”

“Reid, I don’t think—”

“—is he going to kill her?” _Don’t lie to me_ , Reid says with his eyes and his posture, facing his friend as a father and a husband and a colleague all at once. _Don’t lie, Aaron, because Emily knows and you know I’ll be able to tell._

Hotch doesn’t lie.

“He’ll try.”

 

* * *

 

Rossi is stiff and awkward, hovering by her side without actually saying anything, but when the woman walks towards them, he presses closer. Protective.

“SSA Jacobs,” the woman introduces herself, but Emily already knows who she’s with, even if the large CARD logo emblazoned across her FBI windbreaker hadn’t already given the game away. “I’m with the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team. May I have a moment of your time, Ms. Prentiss?”

And there it is. It hammers home in that moment. There’s another member of the CARD team talking to Spencer across the street. Their child is a statistic. Everything she did to keep them safe, gone in a moment. Doyle had found them anyway.

“If you’re considering us as suspects, you’re wasting your time,” Emily says, her eyes still on Spencer as he lifts his hands to his face and presses them across his mouth, as though trying to hold himself together. “I know the stats, but this isn’t a parental abduction.”

“Our technical analysist can back us up on this,” Rossi adds suddenly, his tone husky, and Emily realizes with a jolt that he’s not here working the job, not here simply because their daughter is gone and he needs to find her. Not like Morgan, who’s coldly determined, or Hotch, who’s just determined. Rossi is here because he _loves_ Elliott and has since the first time Emily had dropped her onto his lap and told him to, _look after that, thanks_. “She’s been tracing the messages used to lure Agent Prentiss back to the States, and can confirm they do appear to have been sent by—”

“Ian Doyle,” Jacobs interrupts. “I know. We’re looking into it. But there are other aspects we need to consider—”

“Can I speak to my husband?” There’s nothing Emily can tell them that they don’t already know, and Spencer has his back to the grimy wall behind him, sliding down it. On the ground, his head in his hands, and the CARD agent reaches a consoling hand down. “Please.” Without waiting for an answer, she strides away, almost walking into a cruiser as her focus narrows to the man shattering in the dim light of this endless dawn. His eyes flick up to her as she approaches, watching her over his splayed fingers. He’s talking monotonously. Describing…

Her clothes. He’s giving a description of what she was wearing for the AMBER alert.

Emily stumbles.

“He may change her clothes,” Spencer ends with, dropping his arms to watch her openly. “She was scared. She’s only four and she was terrified, she’d urinated…” He trails off again. He’s struggling, openly, unable to hide any of the emotions rippling across his features with the withdrawal still delaying his reactions. Fear, anger, hatred. “If he intends upon keeping her a-alive, he might… change her clothes.”

“Thank you,” murmurs the agent, noting Emily, and vanishes. Leaving them alone. They’re not suspects. Emily supposes she can thank Hotch for that, because every procedure should have them both still being questioned, separated, distrusted.

“We’re going to find her,” Emily says. The first thing she says to him since dying, at least while he’s conscious enough to heed her words. “She’s going to be fine.”

“Three hours,” he replies, and stands slowly. Painfully. She blinks, seeing him clearly for the first time in the weak, blue morning light, and he’s older. So much older, and she did this to him. There are lines around his mouth that draw it down, lines around his eyes that make him look tired, his hair is short. “In cases where the child is abducted and killed, seventy-six percent of the time it takes place within the first three hours. And he intends on killing her.”

She shakes her head, stubborn. Always stubborn. “Not without me he won’t,” she says, because this is revenge. It’s not enough just to take her daughter. He’ll want her to _watch_. “He’s doing this to hurt me. He thinks I killed his son. She’s not a statistic, Spencer.”

Spencer cocks his head and examines her, almost like how he used to. There’s curiosity under the clawing grief. “Did you?” he asks calmly, and she’s floored. Shakes her head. Feels the shock crack and become a hot, spilling kind of pain that floods her chest and works its way up to dry her throat, to burn behind her eyes. He doesn’t seem to notice this or, if he does, he doesn’t respond to it. “You know, seeing you standing here and Elliott not…” She watches his throat work as he swallows, as he struggles to bite back whatever his stuttering brain is throwing at him, as he fights and loses the cruelty withdrawal always taints him with. “I’d rather bury you again than her.”

It's cruel.

It’s expected.

“So would I,” she answers as he walks away.

 

* * *

 

They’re at Rossi’s with every scrap of the case they’ve been able to beg, buy, and steal from the FBI’s databases with Garcia’s help. It’s like stepping back in time. The whiteboard with pictures of the victim (the victim, not Elliott, compartmentalize effectively to do your job), Morgan and Emily with their heads bowed together as they work on a profile, JJ working with Garcia, cross-legged on the rug. Reid has the geographical profile pinned to Rossi’s wall in front of him. It’s like stepping back in time, except for the notable differences.

The fact that he’s not Emily, he _can’t_ compartmentalize… that’s the biggest one.

It’s three a.m. In two hours, she’ll have been gone for the full twenty-four. In two hours, she’s almost certainly dead.

Emily’s phone is on a cleared space in the centre of the room, mockingly staying silent. They’re waiting for it to ring. Wanting it to. He has to ring, to mock, to _taunt_ , but he hasn’t yet and the wait is destructive.

Reid glances at it once. Then again. Then stares at it, as though willing it to move, to hum, to anything. He’s wrecked, agonisingly tired and every muscle is sparking with a red-hot pain to remind him of his weaknesses. Of his failures. She should be in bed. Curled up with her toys and her kitten and her scrapbook, and she’s not. His heart stumbles, skips, his pulse racing and lungs choking for a long moment, the memory of their failure to continue working heavy in his mind.

“Spence.” He turns his head towards that voice. Rossi. Eyes worried, the box of Doyle’s victims he’s picking through to try and find a pattern still under his palm. “You need to sleep. You can’t keep pushing yourself, your body is already under enough strain. Just a couple of hours, kid.”

The others are looking at him. “You look like you’re going to drop,” Morgan says, which is rich considering he doesn’t look much better. No one has really broached the topic of the ghost in their midst yet, even as the day grinds on and makes her look more corpse than woman. “Seriously, we’ll wake you if we find something or you’ll crack right when we need you.”

It’s a valid, logical point, and he’s clinging to logic right now because rationality will see him through this when his emotions would see him break. So, he goes. Reluctantly and knowing he’ll just lie awake for those few hours, visualizing every case they’ve failed before. But as soon as he falls fully dressed onto Rossi’s bed, he’s leaden, slipping under almost instantly. Waking only once, to a soft knock on the door and the ghost of Emily Prentiss sidling through.

_I love you_ , he thinks, looking at that ghost, but he doesn’t say it because he can’t allow that emotion just yet. Not until their daughter is safe. _I hate you,_ because it’s her demons that did this.

“Stay away from me,” he says instead of all those things, because his demons are still visible in the shake of his body and the clammy cast of his skin, and he needs her to be stronger than him right now. She goes and he sleeps and their daughter is still lost to them.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t listen to him. This time. He’s smarter than her, but he’s also hurting, withdrawn, confused, unwell. She sees it in his eyes when she follows him into the room. There’s no venom in his words, just… exhaustion. He can’t focus on her being back, being alive, not yet.

So she handles it. Alone. Just like she’s been for the last nine months.

Emily Prentiss had a family to protect and she’d died for that. Emily Prentiss would have clung to her husband, and he’d have held her close and borne her through this impossible twist. From profiler to corpse to victim. But she’s not Emily Prentiss anymore, not really. Not yet.

Maybe one day.

When she finds herself again, she’s curled up outside watching the sun come up over the tips of the trees in Rossi’s backyard. The grass is wet with frost, her breath fogging, the world silent, and there are so many hearts being broken around her. Not just hers and Spencer’s. The team’s. Her family. The family that’s missing. A TV fires up in Rossi’s kitchen, the window just thin enough that she can hear it.

_Response teams investigating the abduction of four-year-old Elliott Elizabeth Reid… any information, please call this hotline… abductor considered armed and very dangerous, do not approach… she was last seen wearing…_

“Emily.” It’s JJ, her feet quiet on except for the crunch of frost under her heels. Unlike Emily, she’s wearing shoes. Emily welcomes the cold. It reminds her that she’s alive to feel chilled, alive and able and not giving up on seeing her daughter again. _I wonder what she looks like now_ , she thinks suddenly, because it’s been nine months. _I wonder how she’s changed_. If she goes inside, she can see. Look at the picture on the news that Spencer supplied the investigators with. Relearn the shape of her daughter’s face from the photo declaring her gone. “It’s freezing out here. Come on, come inside…” A warm hand on her cheek, her shoulder, easing her up.

Emily turns and finds herself almost in her friend’s arms. There’s a look in JJ’s eyes that shatters her resolve. “What if she’s gone already?” Emily breathes, unthinkingly, and crumples into those arms. “What if we’re already too late? What is he _waiting_ for?” But she already knows the answer.

This. This is exactly what he’s waiting for.

Them to fall apart.

 

* * *

 

And the hours tick by. Oddly, he discovers that he speaks less as time slips away and the tension builds. The withdrawal fades to a numb reminder but the horror doesn’t fade. They go over every scrap of information they have and then they do it again and then they do it once more.

Twenty-eight hours, and he’s awake and redoing his geographical profile for the fourth time as Rossi makes coffee and they try to choke down buttered toast. He brings his back up and washes his face to continue the illusion that he’s coping.

Thirty hours, and JJ sneaks away so no one sees her crying, but they all know. They all know.

Thirty-five hours, and Emily is interviewed again by CARD. Thirty-six; they interview him and he hears Emily shout from the other room, _what’s fucking **rapid** about this?_ and almost laughs.

Forty, and they let them go home to collect belongings. Sergio is locked in Rossi’s laundry, so Reid finds his favourite toy and tucks it in his pocket. No reason the kitten should be miserable as well, he figures, despite the animal being somehow aware that something is missing and refusing to come out from under the washer. _I miss her too_ , Reid had mumbled to the growls emitting from the tiny space, but the cat hadn’t responded.

He collects a change of clothes and flees the room that’s scattered with memories of that horrible night, dodging evidence markers. Finds Emily standing in Elliott’s room, holding her scrapbook in both hands and looking breathless, poleaxed. It’s open. Pushing aside his innate mistrust of the walking dead, Reid steps closer and looks down at it.

_My Mama,_ in his handwriting. Elliott’s underneath. The page is bare except for those lines.

_Mama is gone now. I miss Mama. Daddy cries. I miss Daddy too._

“I never would have gone if I had a choice,” Emily whispers, more to the book than him. As though Elliott can hear her through the pages. “He was going to hurt you to hurt me.”

“I know,” Reid says, and takes the book from her gently. Closes it and hugs it close with one arm, the other hand free and cold and itching to move towards her. To touch her. Would she feel the same? “I… I would have done the same.”

She looks at him, the same endless dark eyes he fell in love with, and his heart stutters in his chest to remind him that he’d never fallen out of love. She holds her hand out, a request.

He takes it.

A promise.

 

* * *

 

Forty-nine hours, and they can’t keep going like this. The others are floundering, Hotch and JJ haven’t seen their own children since it began, and they’re all looking drawn.

“Bed,” Rossi orders, shooing them. “Here, no one leaves. No one is driving in this state.” They obey because no one has the energy left to argue.

Emily is curled up next to JJ in the spare room, and she can’t sleep. The scrapbook taunts her, those scratchy pages. Elliott’s careful letters, so determined to get them right, and she couldn’t write when Emily left. Could read, but not write, and it’s a painful reminder that there’s a gap of time that Emily is missing of her daughter’s life that she might never get back.

She might never have more.

JJ is asleep, deeply so, her breathing long and even, so Emily slides out of the bed and pads up the silent hall. Rossi’s office door is cracked open, the only one to be so, and she sees Hotch on his made-up bed on the couch against the wall in there. Lifts his head, eyes shadowed in the gloom, and watches her silently as she curls her palm about the cold handle of the master bedroom where Spencer is and slides in. The door closes between her and his steady regard, and she presses her cheek against the wood and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Em.” The voice is hoarse, brittle. She turns again, finds Spencer curled on top of the covers with his knees to his chest and his eyes puffy-red and swollen. The kitten—she hasn’t asked its name yet and she should—is pressed against his chest, purring vibrantly, his wide hand draped over top. She steps closer and can see the trail on her husband’s cheeks from tears.

The knowledge he’s been crying floors her.

He shifts, uncomfortable, and something glints at his chest. Her ring. She knows it’s her ring, because his is vivid on his finger against the black fur of the kitten.

And it’s stupid, reckless, she hasn’t the right anymore, but she moves swiftly across the room to join him on the bed, the mattress dipping between them and drawing them together, and wrapping herself as close to him as she can get without crushing the cat. Head to his chest, mouth against his collarbone, knees knocking together, and she gasps for air as her lungs fail her.

There’s no response for the longest moment. Her mouth brushes the chain with her ring. Turning her head, she can hear his heart in his chest, still beating. Broken. Heartbroken, assuredly, but still beating. “Don’t send me away,” she says into that beating heart, tilting her mouth to brush a kiss against the skin bared to her. Once, twice, desperate. “I can’t bear it.”

She actually feels it jolt, miss a beat. Slam twice to catch up as he sags into her grip, almost-rough fingers catching her jaw and dragging her mouth up to meet his. It’s a long, painful embrace and she knows his touch in every iota of her body.

“No matter what happens,” he says into her mouth, shaping the words carefully against her lips, “don’t leave again. I can’t… can’t let you back in if you’re going to leave again. Not into her life… or mine.”

The tears come along with the words. _I won’t_. He holds her until both have faded, and they fall asleep together. But she wakes first, to a hum at her hip. Her phone. A message.

**Unknown Number: Time to play, sweetheart.**

She freezes. Spencer shifts against her, murmurs something in his sleep, a flicker of some dark misery passing across his features. Her phone hums again. _MMS received_. A swipe of her thumb and Elliott stares up at her, hazel eyes wide and teary, grime across her mouth. She’s holding her stuffed cat, fingers digging into the soft plush. There’s a bruise on her temple, red-raw against her white skin.

Another buzz.

**Unknown Number: Come alone. If you’re late, so is she.**


	8. The Fight

She sits in the plastic backed chair staring straight at the bleach-white wall in front of her, and she feels nothing.

Nothing.

But she remembers everything.

She remembers a grey day and remembering how to fall.

She remembers kneeling in a bathroom, her stomach twisting, and a paper towel falling apart in his magician’s fingers. She remembers him standing in a butter-yellow nursery with one hand resting on a cowboy mobile. She doesn’t need an eidetic memory to remember Cyrus. To remember a KFC parking lot.

To remember his vows.

They haunt her as the nurses smile sadly and tell her she can’t be admitted to her family because she’s still the walking dead. _An object in free fall… it doesn’t technically ever have to land._

They haunt her as Hotch and Rossi both gang up in an attempt to get someone, _anyone_ , behind either of those wide swinging doors.

And they haunt her as the hours tick on and she’s still alone. Still lost. Just like she has been for the past nine months, except now there’s nothing guiding her. _A light in the sky when it’s dark, something to look at and know that things that seem impossible to reach really aren’t that far._

She remembers them and her hand tightens, finger so fucking bare and heart empty.

She hates him. She loves him.

She’s losing him.

There’s blood on her pants. She picks at it numbly, notes there’s more on her hands. More on her shirt. _Back spatter; blood directed back towards the force or energy that caused the spatter._

She scrubs at it harder, Doyle’s voice cold in her mind. _I win._

There’s nothing to do but wait. Wait and think of anything but Doyle, his smile, his hands, his victory over her.

Anything.

_Emily, I stand here and take you as my wife—again—and promise to be whatever you need me to be. A light or a hope or anything in between… I promise._

Anything but that.

 

* * *

 

He won’t have the chance to remember this moment, but this is what happened:

The parking lot is silent. He crouches beside the car, checks his weapon, checks it again. She leans down, breathing loud in the silent morning, and checks it too. Not because she doesn’t trust him—they mesh together still, as easily as a puzzle piece clicking back into place—but because there are some things worth doing again and again and again.

Like this:

He kisses her. Long and slow and with agonising care. He puts everything into it. His love, Elliott’s love, their grief, their past, their future. Everything they have, and had, and will have once more. He still wears both their rings. She’s still a third of his heart.

“Send it,” she murmurs, and he taps at his cell. They’d snuck out together, because Hotch would never allow this—one agent unarmed, unprotected, walking into a madman’s nest, and the other slipping in behind like the ghost Doyle had left on the bedroom floor—but they need their team. The message sends. JJ will wake to it; she starts awake to the slightest whisper of a phone. They’ll have fifteen minutes until the team arrives. Fifteen minutes to save their daughter, no matter the cost. “Spence?”

He looks up. Smiles. The smile is worried and real and focused on their daughter, nearby but out of reach. “Yeah?”

“This isn’t the end of us.”

But they both know; it very well could be.

 

* * *

 

They let her see Elliot, but only after her mother gets there to add her voice to Hotch’s. He slips away once Elizabeth is there, murmuring something about going to work, about fixing this, and she quietly thinks as he strides up the hall that there’s no fixing this.

Elizabeth takes her arm as they walk up the hall of the PICU, her fingers tight and grip painful. She’s shaking and Emily’s numb. It’s a stop-motion walk made of the sound of their footsteps and the ushering nurse and walking into a room that’s too bright and too small and too filled with the bed containing everything she’d die to protect. There’s an oxygen mask on Elliott’s face, too many fucking wires, and she’s sluggish and frantic all at once. _Painkillers_ , Emily thinks, looking at the IV in her hand and the droop to her head as she forces herself to stay awake. _She’s alive_ , she confirms, and closes her eyes, and remembers watching her run from Doyle, run from them, run to some illusion of safety.

“No, no, no,” Elliott’s sobbing, fighting the nurse to push away the oxygen mask, her hands small and weak and pale. “Want Daddy. Want Daddy, please, _no_.” Elizabeth makes a noise, a broken kind of whisper, and ghosts forward into that big room that doesn’t contain enough air for everything happening within.

But there’s a brief moment when that all stops, when Elliot turns her head to see her mama standing in the doorway. A brief moment of shock. Of silence. Of a four-year-old who was three the last time Emily looked at her trying to match this bruised stranger in front of her with the mama of her memories. Then she turns back to the nurse, reaches for Elizabeth, gasps, _where’s Daddy_ again, and ignores her.

It’s what Emily deserves, really.

 

* * *

 

Emily walks to Doyle without a shred of protection except for her husband crouched out of sight with a gun in his hand. They’re at a warehouse. A warehouse on a dock and the air is thick with the scent of fish and the tang of salt. Open-sided; light is pushing in from the wharf, illuminating the ocean, the pier, the drop.

Doyle holds their daughter. She’s quiet. Limp. Not moving, maybe awake, maybe scared, and Reid won’t risk a shot while she’s anywhere near the firing line.

“Standoff,” Doyle says with a barking laugh. “A life for a life. You killed my son—now, I either kill you or I kill your daughter. What a choice, huh?”

It’s not a choice. Both of them know that. Not a choice at all.

But he puts Elliott down. She stares at Emily, pale and glazed-eyed, and there’s no recognition in that expression. Reid’s never seen her this small, this vulnerable, this hurt, and he burns with it.

_How about neither,_ Emily says, and she’s trusting him with more than he’s comfortable with. But she _is_ trusting him. He stands. He fires. It hits, but he’s not sure where, just knows it’s enough to buy them a snatched moment of time.

_Elliott, run!_

He doesn’t know who screamed that, him, or Emily, but their daughter listens. Takes two staggering steps away from Doyle as the man ducks and pulls up his weapon, and then she sprints for the exit. For the light. For some kind of safety.

She sees Reid and turns to run towards him.

Still in the firing line.

“Get her!” and it’s Emily crying out this time, Doyle next to her or running at her, Reid can’t tell, maybe she has him—but he runs. Runs towards his daughter, like it’s a game, like they’re at home. She somehow understands the garbled shout he manages, some kind of, _other way, other way, away from here_! and turns again.

Behind him, the gun fires once and Emily snarls in anger. There’s the meaty sound of something hitting the ground. Reid is five steps behind his fleeing daughter, their backs to her mother; the ground tips under him for a moment, throwing him forward, but he ignores it and keeps going.

Another step. She glances back at him, mouth gaping with fear, slows, and he reaches—

 

* * *

 

Elliott sleeps and Emily can’t. Can’t sleep, can’t breathe, can’t… just _can’t_.

She leaves that bright room, leaves Elizabeth in the comfy armchair with one hand on Elliott’s blanket-covered knee and her head lolled backwards, eyes shut, mouth open. Leaves the haunting feeling of failing. On the way down to where she knows the team is still gathered, she sees a man stumble. He trips on nothing, there’s nothing there, and it breaks something in her.

She remembers another stumble. Another half-staggering skip in the beat of his feet as he’d sprinted—she’d so rarely seen him sprint before she, oddly, remembers that better than she remembers the relief she’d felt when he’d straightened, the glee that he’d reached Elliott, the joy of seeing him scoop her up and keep going like the stumble had never happened at all—the impact throwing him off. But only a little. He’d just… kept going. Kept going until he wasn’t going anymore, but falling, and maybe he’d been falling all along.

She remembers the bizarrely bright bloom of colour on his light shirt. Can’t remember what colour the shirt originally was. Pale blue, maybe. Red now. Brown, eventually.

She sees a man stumble on the way to her team, and that’s all she can think about.

JJ looks up when Emily steps into the room. Emily catalogues their body language— _Rossi, stiff backed, mouth firm, hopeful; JJ, wide-eyed, shaking, grieving; Morgan, rigid, angry; Garcia, crying, huddled, terrified_ —and wonders what they see when they look at her. Exhaustion, probably.

“Anything?” she asks them, helplessly. Their eyes slip past her. She turns.

“Emily Prentiss?” the doctor asks, and Hotch is behind him. He smiles, weakly, nods, and she knows that somewhere in an office deep in the Bureau, someone had ticked all the right boxes to finally bring her back to life.

She takes a breath, the first living one for nine months, and says, “That’s me. My husband?”

And they take her to him.

 

* * *

 

—and scoops her up. Picks her up, still running, _get out of the line of fire_! and he intends to. But he doesn’t. Arms around his neck, Elliott is screaming, and he’s not running anymore but falling. He registers pain, distant and radiating from his side, and then the ground tilts out from under them and is replaced with a white-tipped blue. Even in the haze of confusion as to why his body is ignoring him, he still curls around his daughter so he can take the impact instead of her.

 

* * *

 

Elliott looking small in the bed too big for her is expected.

Spencer looking small is five times as destructive.

He’s silent. Not aurally—aurally there’s beeping, the rasp of his breath under the thin mask, the busy sounds of the hospital outside of Recovery, the chatter of the doctor—but in _himself_ , he’s silent. Less. Still and slackened under the blankets, one hand loose on his stomach and his head tipped slightly sideways. She steps towards him, once, twice, and his eyes are closed.

“When will he wake up?” she asks, closing her eyes, seeing him holding their daughter, seeing his eyes widen as he registers the bullet in his side, seeing him tip forward as his legs fold under him. But he’s alive, here, pale and with his hair in manky clumps and brushed away from his face, vividly realized against the white bedding. He’s not falling anymore.

_Anaesthetic will be wearing off soon,_ they say, _ten minutes until he begins to rouse._

So she waits ten minutes. And then two minutes more, just to be sure. She doesn’t touch him or move closer, and the room gets colder as the minutes tick on. He doesn’t wake up. They do tests. They pull him away. She’s silent. _CT scan, oedema, AVPU:_ a million and one technical terms and she can’t swallow them all. Just sits by his bed when they bring him back, occasionally saying his name in a sharp voice just to watch his eyes flicker and mouth shift as he registers the sound, if not consciously.

_We’re not sure,_ they say, because they won’t commit to anything yet. _We’ll see what happens. It’s hopeful that he’s rousing to voice, it’s hopeful._

Hopeful.

She visits Elliott, who ignores her. Reassures the team, who don’t believe her. Tries to send her mom home to sleep, who refuses her. And the day grinds on.

“Emily,” Hotch says. He’s in the room with Spencer and the noisy silence and everything they can’t say to each other, “He’s still alive. You’re scaring Elliott acting like he’s not.”

She tries to get angry at him for that, but she can’t. Tries to respond, and she’s voiceless. Looks at Spencer instead because, hell, at least like this he can’t be a smartass. “What do I say?” she asks, but it’s an hour later and Hotch is gone and Spencer is silent.

She begins by touching him. Just a touch, a brush of the pads of her fingers over his arm. Pressing down. A pulse beats below them. Slow but real, and her heart skips and stumbles and hammers twice just to remind her she can still feel, still hurt, even if she’s pretending she can’t.

Shifts that touch to his face, near the mask.

“You said you wouldn’t hurt me,” she says finally, helplessly. “So… don’t. Please. Elliott needs you. She doesn’t know me, doesn’t understand, and I…” The floor scuffs behind her.

Rossi. He’s watching her, his mouth twisted, and she doesn’t know what to do. She splays her hand against Spencer’s clammy-hot cheek, and bites her lip hard enough to flavour her mouth with copper.

“It’s going to be okay, Em,” Rossi says finally, and they both know that’s very likely a lie. He’s closer, walking closer, and puts his arm around her. She lets him, leaning into his hold, letting her head rest against his chest and his heart and wishing it was another arm, another chest, another still-beating life. “Look, he’s paying attention. Lazy shit is just having a nap.”

The laugh is strained and involuntary as she looks down at the bed, at the flicker of his fingers on the white bed. The barest hint of his eyes opening. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t…

It could.

“Okay,” she says. A hint of hope. If _Rossi_ believes it, she can too. “I’m going to kick his ass when he wakes up though, I tell you.” No more nothing. No more hiding from this. She pulls away from Rossi, brings her mouth to the cheek of the man she still loves helplessly, presses her lips against him. Breathes him in; the scent of his skin, the suggestion of stubble, the hot—

“Should he be this warm?” she asks. The words tumble out. Rossi jolts. Reaches down, running the back of his fingers against the bare skin of Spencer’s arm. Frowns. Presses the nurse call button.

And they fall again.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t remember the impact, just the fall. Free fall; there’s no guarantee of an impact.

But there is one.

They hit the water. Elliott screams until there’s no air left to scream anymore.

_Assuredly fatal,_ he thinks wildly, and then he thinks very little at all.

 

* * *

 

She waits with Elliott. Elliott sleeps; sleeps off the fear and the confusion and the pain of her bruised ribs. She’s asleep when Emily slinks in like an unwanted memory, and she only wakes up once, when Emily is half-asleep and panicking because she can’t remember which of her family is slipping away. She reaches out, takes that tiny hand in hers, and Elliott opens her eyes and smiles. Whispers, _hi, Mama,_ because she’s too sleepy to remember that Mama died.

She’s asleep again when the call comes for Emily. The whispered terminology. The heart-stopping finality.

_Acute respiratory distress… caused by an infection… caught early but… unfortunately, no longer responding to stimuli… we don’t know, we don’t know, we just don’t **know** …_

_Life support._

Breaking point.

She doesn’t go straight there. It’s the third night since she’d watch him fall. The third night since she’d screamed so hard it had torn something inside her; the third night since she’d watched her husband’s body curve gracefully through the air and vanish off the edge, her daughter clinging desperately to him with her head turned towards the drop. It’s the third night, so the others aren’t there, and she can’t do this by text. She rings Hotch. Tells him. Doesn’t remember the call after. Lets him do the rest.

It almost feels like she should be lying alongside Spencer. Standing by his bed, staring at the unnatural rise and fall of his chest as the ventilator forces him to live, she says his name and he doesn’t twitch. Not a flicker. Nothing there.

Like she should be lying alongside him, the machine pushing air into her chest as well, because she’s struggling to remember how to focus on both him and breathing at the same time.

Like she should be lying there instead of him, because she hadn’t killed Doyle in time. Because Spencer had fallen, holding their daughter, and Doyle had still been alive to gloat. To grab her ankle and drag her down, to stop her reaching them in time. To grapple for the gun.

To lose that fight. She’d turned, nothing but angry in that moment, won the gun, pressed it to the first part of him she could reach (his cheek, it was his cheek) and deafened herself by pulling the trigger. She hadn’t paused to see the outcome.

Just thrown herself after her family, into that silent, waiting water.

She thinks, _please live_ , and then moments later it hits her. What this could mean. What any of it could mean. Those clinical terms bounce around in her brain again, taking up all the space in her head: hypoxic brain injury, vegetative state, irreparable neurological trauma.

And she thinks, _you’d rather be dead._

He could wake up. He could be fine.

He could wake up. He could slip away.

He could wake up, but not really, that agile brain of his silenced forever by a bullet and a choice that she’d made.

Her daughter or her husband.

“I need you to live,” she breathes, hunching close over him, hair dark against the white of his hand. The hand she’d grabbed for under that suffocating water. He’d been conscious. She thinks. He might not have been, maybe she’s just telling herself that to deny that she’d left him there; grabbed their limp daughter from his arms and swam up and up and up to the broken light above. “That’s why I died for you, Spence, please. Jesus. You bounce back, you always bounce back, I knew you’d bounce back for her if I wasn’t there but… I don’t. I don’t recover from things like this, like losing _you_.”

Like killing him.

Like dragging Elliott from the water (she wasn’t breathing).

Like making that choice (him or her).

The four-year-old girl with brown curls like her daddy and hazel eyes like him too, cold and blue on the wet wood of the pier. Cold and blue and not breathing, not living. She’d live. Likely live. _Immediate CPR offers the best chance of survival._

It wasn’t a choice at all.

“I flounder,” she admits, because she’d floundered then. Taken two heaving gasps of that salt laced air, convinced herself that the splash of the water lapping at the cement below was him surfacing, and turned her back on the man she’d sworn never to turn away from. “I convince myself everything is fine and that I can keep going no matter what, but it’s not, and it always catches up on me, and… I can’t do this. I’m not you. I can’t _bury_ you, Spencer, _please_.”

_One, two, three_ , as the little chest under her had moved under her hands. _One, two, three,_ as the chest in front of her keeps struggling on. _One, two, three, don’t think of him drowning, don’t think of him dying, don’t think of **him**._

It’s stupid. He can’t hear her. He’s half a heartbeat away from gone forever. She says it anyway: “I can’t keep going knowing you were here and alive and… now you’re not and never will be.” She’s never done this. Opened her heart to him, bared every vulnerability. Never trusted him enough.

She does it now and it’s still not enough.

_One, two, three_ and Elliot had coughed, vomited, cried out and shuddered and convulsed under her. One beat to turn her on her side, one to murmur, _it’s okay, baby, Mama’s here, Mama’s got you_ , one more to realize she was alone. One last as Hotch had appeared, Rossi two beats behind, for her to choke and realize and panic and scream those five words.

_He’s still in the water!_

The doctor is there, quiet, watching. Emily lifts her head, hollow and broken, and stares at him accusingly. Everything is muted except for the sound of the noisy machine by her ear and the memory of the two men hitting the water, diving, going for what she’d left behind.

“I think you should bring your daughter up now,” the doctor says, and Emily closes her eyes.

Impact.

 

* * *

 

Elliott wakes up and hurts. Chest hurt, tummy hurt, and she’s puked. Everything is wet; her hair, her clothes, Mama.

Mama is there.

But Mama is dead?

It’s achy, awful, and she can’t move proper, can’t sit up. Mama’s hands are rough. Elliott tries to talk and chokes. Tries to cry and it hurts so bad she yells. There’s all kinds of shouting, all around her. Mama is shouting too. It takes a couple of tries to hear her through the thumping noise in Elliott’s ears, like she’s gone swimming and forgot her ear plugs. She’s saying; “Is he alive, oh my god, Aaron, is he fucking _alive_?”

Elliott turns her head to look at what Mama is angry about. Uncle Aaron. He’s on his knees, his hair flat and silly looking against his head, and he’s breathing hard enough that he’s gone all raspy and strange, and he’s staring. Staring at…

“Daddy?” Elliott asks, but her voice is too quiet and no one listens. Everyone is wet. Even Uncle Dave as he pushes down again and again and again on Daddy’s tummy, and Daddy doesn’t tell him to stop. Doesn’t… do anything.

_Is he alive_? Mama is asking, and Elliott knows that if you’re not alive you’re dead and decomposing. You go in the box. _Please, god, no no, Spencer, please,_ and Elliott sits up to see better, and it hurts, but she has to _know_.

Mama stops talking, stops shouting, just goes weird and quiet and blank and stares at nothing. Uncle Aaron shuffles over to her on his knees, and Elliott is still watching Uncle Dave, confused, _why is he kissing Daddy why isn’t Mama, what’s going on, why why why._ She looks at Uncle Aaron as he reaches them, and feels sick.

“Is Daddy dead?” she asks Uncle Aaron calmly, and knows he is and then the sick gets sicker and she feels herself falling. He catches her, she knows that much, knows he’s shouting too now, _medics, where are the medics? Elliott, love, look at—_


	9. The End

When Elliott was born, her parents fell irrevocably in love with her, and none more so than her father. Emily wasn’t surprised. After all, Spencer Reid had proven over and over again that while his brain was capable of great things, his heart was capable of so much more. And if there was one thing that Spencer threw himself into wholeheartedly and with no regard for his own wellbeing, it was loving others.

Elliott didn’t know any of this at the time and wouldn’t until many years later as she’d flip idly through a yellow-paged scrapbook and pause at her father’s cramped, _Today, Elliott has decided that she doesn’t want to participate. Despite her intentions of being cranky, we’re going to have fun anyway._ Underneath in wonky letters someone had written _Daddy made a Fort for being cross in_. _It has blankets._

Emily, however, had known it instantly and absolutely. She’d known it in the expression on his face when he’d held his infant daughter and she’d known it in the way he delighted in every milestone passed, no matter how small. Most of all, she’d known it in the quiet words shared when he thought he was alone; alone except for the baby in his arms or splayed on the bed next to him with her intent eyes locked on his hands.

_You’re going to be so much more than you know,_ he’d whisper, and Emily would stay quiet by the doorway and consider everything they’d suffered through to get to this point. _And I’m going to be there to see it all._

She never forgets these moments.

 

* * *

 

Elliott fights the nurse and she fights Emily and she’s thoroughly confused as to why they’re getting her out of bed before the sun is even up. She’s tired, cranky, sore, weaned off painkillers just enough that the ache from her bruised ribs makes her breath hitch as they move her to a wheelchair. Kicking her feet makes it hurt more, Grandma isn’t there to cling to, and Elliott looks to Emily for the first time since her death.

“Ow, Mama,” she whispers, hunching into the chair. “It _hurts_.”

There’s something heavy and broken-hearted sinking deep into Emily’s chest. Some vicious kind of scarring that this night has reopened, some seeping wound that she knows is going to burst open and take everything she is with it. It’s held together with the hopeful longing in Elliott’s eyes, as she allows herself the thought that maybe Mama is really back, and the whisper of hope that maybe this isn’t the end of them. Maybe.

She crouches by the chair, bringing her mouth to her baby’s cheek and shaken by how much she’s grown without her. How far Spencer has brought her on his own, despite him never quite believing he’d deserved the honour of a child. “We’re going to see Daddy, okay?” she says, and the words tear that wound just a little more. “He’s…” The nurse looks away. “…he’s very sick and very sleepy, and he’s going to look different than what you’re used to.”

“He’s got a mask?” Elliott asks, glancing back at her bed where the dreaded mask they’d removed from her the day before is still on stand-by. “And lots of needles?”

Emily nods. Swallows. And shuffles forward to cuddle her daughter close, feeling hesitant arms wrap around her neck and the wet, hot breath puffing against her throat. “You understand that hospitals are where the very sick go, don’t you?” she asks, and the pain is leeching up into her face and making everything burn. “And Daddy is… very sick.”

Elliott is silent. She lets go, pulls back, looks away.

She says nothing, and they wheel her from the room.

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was one, her father taught her to read.

But first, he taught her to love. To love the worlds he spun with his voice and his laugh and his giddy delight in the weaving of tales. To love the whisper of a page turning gently. To love the brightly coloured pages in the books that he chose for her, the books that Emily was still floored by. She’d expected, half-expected—because Spencer had never showed any inclination that he was _aware_ that toddlers were confounded by physics—journals and tomes and a bored toddler being lectured about Descartes. Because, she’d forgotten; he loves magic too.

_It’s a tradition, Em,_ he’d murmur, crawling onto whatever surface she was sitting on at the time with their daughter, a book, and a woeful expression. _We need to make traditions._

There was no arguing with him when he was snuggly like this, so she’d let him. Let him plonk Elliott between them, lean the book on her lap, and draw her into a world that was so much more than any she’d ever been offered as a child. Magic and witches and fairy-tales and dragons and a decided lack of _logic_ , and she never admitted to him how much she loved these nights, or how much she missed them when they were gone.

“Dis the cat,” Elliott read slowly, chubby finger tracing the black cat strutting proudly across the page. “The cat is… is what, Daddy?”

“Magic,” Spencer murmured, and he sounded so sure that even Emily was half-convinced.

“ _Magic_ ,” Elliott parroted with a gasp, her own eyes wide.

She never lost that wonder.

 

* * *

 

They’ve removed the mechanical ventilation, and Emily wants to believe that’s a good sign, despite the mask still firmly sealed to his face and the greyish cast to his skin. _Breathing again_ , the doctor assures her, tentatively, but doesn’t meet her eyes when she asks what that means. And Elliott is silent. The room is silent. Silent except for two lonely souls and another that’s failing.

“Can I go up?” Elliott asks suddenly, when the silence is too much to bear, and the nurse looks at Spencer and winces. Emily looks too. “Please, Mama? I’ll be careful. I won’t hurt him or wake him up.”

The nurse nods, stepping forward, and between them they get the girl onto the quiet bed, carefully away from his still-healing side. And Elliott is careful, cautious, inching closer and closer until she can huddle against her daddy and peer at Emily over his sluggishly moving chest like a frightened kitten seeking comfort. A small hand pats his chest, rests over his heart, and she lays close.

“I’ll be outside,” the nurse says, and leaves. Emily waits a moment, an outsider, before realizing Elliott’s waiting for her. It’s a careful risk, but she manages to edge herself into the thin space behind her daughter, resting her own arm over Elliott’s shaking shoulders to splay her hand across the smaller one, both focused on the heart below.

And it hits Emily suddenly, laying like this with her fractured family, that this could be it. The last night, the last morning; the last of something. Like cupping sand between spread fingers, he’s slipping away, his skin cool to the touch and his nails tinted blue. Whatever damage he’d taken in the dark endless waters of the harbour, it was finally catching up, irrevocably turning him away from them.

And she gasps, barely choking it back, because whatever wound she’d imagined in her chest earlier feels realized and fatal; a heart-wrenching grief that tears the noise from her throat and makes her body curl inward, maybe to protect her daughter, maybe to protect herself. Her knee knocks against his legs. He’s silent. She remembers everything all at once and drowns with it.

Another whimper and it’s not hers. Elliott is staring at her, shaking, crying, and doesn’t seem to understand why. Just responding to the wordless grief in her mama behind her. She opens her mouth, tries to say something to her frightened, helpless child but what comes out is a gasping kind of moan that she imagines is very much what it sounds like when a heart is broken.

Instead of anything, she presses her face against her daughter’s back, and tries to hides the tears, fingers gripping tightly to the hand on her husband’s failing heart. She doesn’t know what’s worse: knowing that he’s dying or knowing that she almost wants him to. _You’d rather die than be like this,_ she thinks, and hates herself, and blames herself. _You’d rather be dead than without your mind._

_And knowing that, I still let you drown._

“Daddy told me a story,” Elliott says suddenly, her voice shrill and overloud in her worry. Emily can’t answer. “Can I tell you?” She doesn’t wait, but charges on. “He said it was a yucky day, a grey day…” Emily is frozen, eyes open, heart stopped. “… and he said he loved you.”

“Did he?” Emily whispers, and isn’t sure if she managed the words. Elliott nods. “Did he say anything else?” Another nod.

“He said you were showing him how to get back up.”

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was two, Spencer caught Emily dancing without music in wide, joyous circles around the living room. Elliott shrieked from her arms, arms thrown outward, absolutely sure that her mama would never ever let her go. Laughing and alive and vibrant with the world; this is a moment he never, ever forgets. He joined in without a pause, missing every step. None of them cared, least of all Elliott.

 

* * *

 

Elliott doesn’t want to leave, but it’s daylight now and there are others who need… time. And Emily doesn’t want _it_ to happen, if it’s going to, she doesn’t want her daughter there to commit it to her infallible memory.

Hotch is there when they try to take Elliott away. “No,” she says stubbornly, cringing away from their arms with her little fist bunching in the blanket over her daddy. “I can’t go yet. I can’t go! Mama, I can’t, I can’t, I _can’t_.”

“She needs to be quiet,” someone mutters, a nurse perhaps, and Emily hears someone else snap something sharp to them and is glad she doesn’t have to.

“Elliott, love, please,” she coaxes, tired, strained, ready to snap like brittle plastic left under the sun too long. “Shh, shh, quiet. You’ll…”

“I’ll wake Daddy?” Elliott finishes hopefully, looking thoughtful, and Emily winces. _I wish,_ she almost says, along with, _try it_ , because goddamn, if anything will pull him out of his own head, the sound of his daughter screaming might. But they find out it doesn’t as soon as they lift her down, because she screams and howls and cries until her face is red and breathing ragged, hurting herself more by kicking at them to put her down. Emily can’t hear words in the frantic noise, just misery and terror and desperation and, when she tries to soothe her, Elliott shoots her a hateful look that promises that she knows _exactly_ who to blame for being sent away from the one place she wants to stay.

“Elliott, stop,” says a low voice that cuts through the screams. Elliott jolts, turning horribly pale, looking first at the silent bed, and then at Hotch. “No more.”

Elliott’s lip wobbles, tears spilling, and Emily wants to cover her ears because the silence is worse than the sound, somehow. “But I asked him for a hug,” she says finally, and begins to cry again. Not screaming crying, not a tantrum. Just… helpless tears. “I asked him and he didn’t give me one and I was good, I was good… I don’t _want_ to go.”

“Mamas can hug when Daddies can’t,” Emily says numbly, because she has to at least _try_ to pin herself together, but Elliott shakes her head adamantly.

“Not the same,” is the whispered reply. _Not the same, never the same._

Hotch looks to her for permission, before crouching by the chair. “Your Daddy can’t right now,” he says gently. Emily notes in that moment she’s never seen him like this, in father-mode, except for once. At Haley’s funeral, to a lost little boy. That thought is paralysing. “But your Mama can hug you for him, he won’t mind. Or I can, if you’d prefer. It won’t be the same, but it will help us feel better as well, not just you. Would you like that?”

“Please,” Elliott says, clinging to Hotch’s shirt with her eyes screwed shut and mouth twisted. Pretending. Pretending desperately, and that’s okay, because Emily’s tempted to pretend too. He holds her carefully, his own face turned away from the watching eyes, and she knows there’s a grief there that mirrors hers. They’re all losing something here. There’s a muffled, “Want Mama now, please,” from his chest that would almost draw a smile on any other day, and Emily steps forward once more.

“Stay—” she begins to say to Hotch, right before the weight of the words silences her. She breathes, registers his pain as well, and tries again. “Please stay with him? I’ll be back, I’m coming straight back, just… stay.”

She’s pleading. There’s an unspoken, _don’t let him slip away while I’m not here_ , in her words, and Hotch nods and watches her leave. Emily refuses to look at the bed on the way out because that’s too final, and Elliott’s gaze doesn’t break from it at all under the door swings shut between them.

She whispers it, but Emily hears her anyway; the quiet, _bye Daddy,_ that breaks both their hearts.

 

* * *

 

It’s a flicker.

A whisper of sound. The sensation of drowning. Of surfacing.

_Stay_ , she says, and he wants to say, _I’m not going anywhere_.

But a flicker only lasts a heartbeat.

_I’m still here._

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was three, her Mama went away. For a while, her Daddy did too. She didn’t really understand why. Grief was a concept too big, too final, and it hurt too much to imagine for long.

But Daddy was sad, sad all the time, and she understood that just fine. Being sad was when nothing was fun and everything was awful. Being sad was when something in your belly and your head got all twisted and angry and made you mean. Elliott got sad sometimes, and Mama always took her to her room, made her sit down quiet on her bed, and not come out until she could explain _why_ she was sad.

Mama always stayed though. On the sad days, the hurting days, Mama always stayed with her on her bed reading a book or just with her eyes closed, until Elliott was ready to not be sad anymore. Sometimes she was sad when Mama wasn’t there, but Daddy took her place.

That was how it worked, until Mama went away for good. Then all there were were sad days and not even sitting quiet made them good again.

On this day, Elliott was ready not to be sad anymore.

She took her book and she took her cat and she found her Daddy on the living room couch, curled up with his back to the wall and eyes locked on the blank telly. “What are you doing, Ellie?” he asked as she crawled onto the couch next to him and shuffled back.

“Reading a book,” she said, tucking her head against his tummy. “Shh. Listen.”

He had. But even when the quiet time was over, she didn’t ask him why he was sad. She just hugged him close and hoped for something more than this.

 

* * *

 

“I have to go stay with Daddy,” Emily explains to the quietly shell-shocked Elliott once she’s safely back in her own bed. Elliott’s eyes skitter around the room, the empty room, and she’ll be alone. “I’m sorry, baby, I’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Okay,” comes the quiet reply, because Elliott is braver than both her parents combined. “Mama?”

Emily pauses midway to brushing her lips against her daughter’s cheek. Does so, feeling the muscles shift as words are formed. “If Daddy dies, we shouldn’t bury him.”

Emily is stunned. Hazel eyes turn to meet her as she straightens, wordless. “Elliott…” she tries, but the little girl who’s not so little anymore, not really, keeps going relentlessly.

“It’s dark underground,” she says, mouth stubborn. “He doesn’t like the dark and there’s no plugs for a nightlight.” There’s a long pause, before she adds, “There are other options, you know,” and it’s so _Spencer_ that Emily laughs hoarsely just because she realizes he’s not really leaving her.

“I love you,” she says.

Elliott smiles, curling up as much as she can in the bed without her ribs hurting her. “Love you too, Mama,” she replies, and watches Emily leave.

 

* * *

 

A touch of a hand on his palm, fingers tracing gently. He tries to turn towards that touch, craves it, but he’s becoming very aware that something is wrong. Everything is wrong. _He’s_ wrong.

_Come on, Spencer,_ someone says, and their voice is deep and almost painful to hear. A pressure on his shoulder, the brush of hair against his cheek. He twitches away from that tickling touch, feels something move with him, on his mouth, his throat. _Don’t make us grieve you. Not when we’ve just gotten her back. Not when you don’t know how much you’ll be missed._

_Aaron,_ Reid thinks suddenly.

But everything is wrong, and the voice goes away.

_I’m sorry._

 

* * *

 

She opens the blind just so she can watch the sun come up. They’re allowed one visitor at a time, and as the morning ticks on, those visitors come. Emily notes them, distantly. JJ, tearful. Garcia, bawling. Rossi, silent. Hotch, twice. JJ doesn’t bring Henry. Diana isn’t there. Hadn’t taken the news well. Wasn’t expected to recover from the news. Elizabeth is consoling, but distant. Here for Emily, here for Elliott, unsure about Spencer still.

There’s no Gideon. No William.

No Morgan.

And then she’s alone. They give her space, and Spencer…

Hangs on. Keeps on keeping on. Just as stubborn as always.

“Stubborn,” she murmurs, and tugs open his drawer next to the bed. His belongings are in there, neatly stacked. She takes his wedding ring from the top, and slides it on her finger. Takes hers from underneath it and slips onto the bed, wrapping the chain loosely around his slack hand and resting her own within it. “Always stubborn, you are. And self-sacrificing, like a fucking asshole. No idea of your own worth…”

It occurs to her that coma patients usually retain some hearing, and she winces. “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” she asks, and lays back, rearranging herself next to him like he’s not covered in machines, like there isn’t a mask on his face, like he’s just… having a sleep-in. Long day, no coffee.

She laughs. Maybe that’s why he’s refusing to wake up. “Should get you a coffee IV,” she says, and traces her hand up his inner arm, feeling the barest hint of the scars his demons had left there. “Make it shit coffee. Then you’ll wake up alright, just to look sad until one of us finds you the good stuff. Lots of sugar, right?”

Silence. His head has tilted towards her from her weight on the pillow and she amuses herself for a moment by pretending he did it on purpose, that he’s going to open his eyes and smile at her. It seems almost _certain_ for a second, that he will.

But he doesn’t and it’s strangely like losing him all over again.

“You know,” she says, lowering her voice despite there being no one to hear, because she’s not sure she’s told him this yet. Or ever. “It’s… okay. I was… selfish. Wrong. The other day. I said I couldn’t bounce back from this and it occurs to me that if you heard that, you’re probably staying just because you can’t bear to see me hurt. And that’s… I will hurt. For the rest of my life, I’ll hurt for the wanting of you, but I’ll hurt more if you hang on when there’s nothing to hang on to. If you stay like this for us.” She pushes closer, hears a movement at the door, can’t stop now or she’ll never start again. Pressing her cheek as close to his as she can without jarring the mask; his skin is wet. “Every time I look at her, I’m going to see you and remember everything you mean to me and everything we sacrificed for this…” She stops, and there’s a pained kind of hiss behind her, deep and hurting. She turns.

_Morgan._

_Finally._

 

* * *

 

For a moment, he thinks maybe he’d only thought about opening his eyes. The room is dim. White and dim and blurred at the edges. There’s a ghost curled against him.

_I’m dead,_ he thinks, and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the room is brighter. Louder.

The ghost is still there.

_Emily._

_But Emily is dead?_

His breath hitches under the mask, every part of his body choking and stammering over that thought. All those thoughts. Emily dead, him dead, Elliott alone—

“Spence?” The ghost jerks up, leans closer. Her hands are warm. “Oh my god, Morgan, _Morgan_.” Another deep voice, and he shuts his eyes to close it out. It hurts. It all hurts.

_No, wait. Spencer, love, please—_

_Let you die_ , he tries to tell the ghost, his tongue thick and immobile in his mute mouth. _Let myself die._ _M’sorry._

And he thinks he might be, if he’s not already. Dying, that is. He’s been here before, and it feels just the same. Just the same, but for one difference.

This time he doesn’t want it.

_Please wait, stay, open your eyes. I love you, please—_

_I don’t want this. Let me **live**._

* * *

 

“—hey, hey, stay with us, come on, open your eyes again—” She’s rambling, panicked, her hands cupping his cheeks and she _hadn’t_ imagined it, he’d opened them, he’d fucking _open them, open them again you bastard!_

“Emily!” Morgan, trying to tug her back, hospital personnel moving around them despite Spencer laying there as cold and still as ever, like she’d fucking _hallucinated it._

“No, let go, I didn’t—” she snarls, shaking her arm out of Morgan’s grip, but he clings tighter and she looks at him. Really looks at him. Face swollen, eyes red; he’s close enough she can smell the alcohol he had to drink to walk in here, and he’s fucking wrecked.

“You didn’t,” he reassures her, as a machine shrills once and makes them all start. “I saw it too.”

They’re wheeling him out. Taking him away. “Wait,” she says, surging forward, catching the rail. “Just… just let me… Spence, hey, listen, you ass. For once in your life, _listen to me_.” It could be the lights, or it could be his eyes, but there’s a flicker there.

“I’m thankful,” she breathes, leaning over him, pressing her lips to his forehead and murmuring into his skin, into his head, so the idiot _retains_ it in his rattled brains. “Thankful for everything you’ve given me, every minute, every fall. Everything. I love you.”

If his mouth moves, the mask hides it.

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was closer to five than four, Daddy almost died. But he didn’t, and Elliott knew why. He’d promised her he’d stay.

And he does.


	10. The After

He’s utterly aggravating and she tells him so. Over and over and over, and she smiles every time. It’s a relieved kind of smile, a scared-to-be-happy kind of smile, because it’s been two days since he’d almost left them and he’s still here.

Almost.

He opens his eyes, watches them with a distracted exhaustion, and then closes them again. _This is normal_ , the doctors assure her. _It’s a slow process._

Slow process alright; she’s about ready to smack him awake if he keeps teasing her like this. She’s done waiting. Done waiting to see him smile again, done waiting to hear his throaty voice murmuring her name. She _wants._ Wants to hear him tell her he loves her, that he forgives her, that he’s coming home to her. But he can’t, not yet, so she paces and she clings to his hand—sometimes he even tightens his grip around her palm, just to remind her he’s still _here_ —and she tells him how utterly aggravating he is. And the one thing she does more than anything is to ignore the worried murmurs of the neurologist assigned to him. She can’t listen. She’d just gotten him back. _Elliott_ had just gotten him back.

_Stop trying to take this away from us,_ she thinks furiously when the neurologist is doing his usual cautious, _we’re optimistic **but** there is some damage. It may be nothing._

_It may be something._

_It may be everything._

Emily’s seen those scans. She’s seen the ominous black patches that the doctors peer at and poke at and murmur at and test again and again and again and again.

They may be nothing.

When she looks up, he’s staring at her. He looks, for a moment, confused, peering around the room, before his eyes shutter closed.

“Come on, you bastard,” she says, jabbing his arm. Hazel eyes flicker open again, his mouth quirking into a lopsided kind of smile, and her heart hammers in her chest. “Oh, you _can_ hear me. Hello, you.”

The smile lingers as he drifts off again, but this time she lets him go without a battle. He’ll get there. Eventually.

 

* * *

 

Life becomes a snapshot of white-sharp moments. High voices, hurtful voices, pain, a disconnected kind of wistfulness. Emily is there, sometimes. Her ghost is, anyway. Or all the time, and maybe it’s him drifting. Elliott is there, always. Even when not physically, he imagines a phantom hand slipping into his, damp, candy-scented lips against his cheek, a soft giggle, a whispered, _come on, Daddy, come read with me._ And he tries.

He tries as hard as he can.

But it’s like climbing a mountain made of glass with weights on his ankles. Every movement just serves to drag him down more, exhaust him further. Whatever happened to him—because he doesn’t know _what_ or when or anything other than a vague memory of Elliott screaming—it’s hollowed him out and left him as a mockery of himself. But then…

It clears.

Just a little. Just enough.

And he listens intently from this glass mountain that’s become his mind, encasing him within his own head. He listens and he _hears_.

_Daddy beeps too loud. He can’t hear the book._

_Yes, he can. He’s listening carefully. Come on. We’re up to here, where my finger is—read along._

_‘Real isn't how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse—am I real, Mama? —yes, keep reading— ‘It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.’—now you read a bit._  

_‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. You’re supposed to be reading this, El, not me. Daddy doesn’t want to hear me read._

He knows the next line. He doesn’t remember what left him stranded on this glass mountain, but he remembers this book. Remembers reading it to Elliott, over and over and over, with Emily pretending not to listen. He mouths the words along without his body responding to his prompting— _‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.’_  

He wouldn’t mind being hurt, if it meant being real again.

 

* * *

 

On the fourth day, she scares him. Scares herself.

Scares Elliott the worst.

Elliott’s finally been discharged. They were worried about her lungs, worried about her breathing, concerned about whether her bruised ribs are restricting her, but finally she’s out. She’s hyper with the excitement of being in her own clothes, holding her bag, _going home_. Rambles about her kitten and her bedroom and her favourite cereal—one with enough sugar in it that Emily had banned it from the house when she was ‘alive’ previously, and she’s wanly amused to know that Reid had used her death to sneak it back in and get their child hooked on it.

“Are we going to see Daddy?” she demands from the wheelchair they’re making her ride in until leaving the hospital. Fortunately, she seems to enjoy being wheeled out, her knees tucked up and stuffed cat lolling dangerously over the edge. “Is he coming home? Is he gonna sleep all the time at home too? He can have my bed if he wants, it’s comfy.”

“Daddy’s not coming home yet, love,” Emily says, bumping Spencer’s door open, and he looks up at her and turns white under the mask.

It’s, she realizes later, the first time he’s _actually_ recognised her. _Post-traumatic amnesia is likely,_ she’d been warned, and she’d assumed this would mean he wouldn’t remember the fall.

Apparently, he it also meant that he doesn’t remember she’s alive.

He panics, of course he does. She has time to realize this after, as she hugs her daughter to try and calm her terror at seeing what happens next. _Of course he panicked,_ she thinks then, hugging Elliott close as she girl hiccups into her chest. _Confined to a hospital bed with no idea why, and a dead woman walks in with his daughter. What else would he think?_

“Is that going to happen again?” she asks a doctor, when Rossi arrives with a book and a balloon shaped like SpongeBob, and promptly abandons both of them to cuddle the exhausted Elliott while Emily finds Spencer’s doctor. “The…”

“Seizures can be a side-effect of a hypoxic brain injury,” the doctor replies, as calmly as if he’s not confirming something she’s been busy ignoring. “He hasn’t exhibited signs of serious neurological damage, that we can tell so far, so it’s likely they may abate on their own. Medication can ease them until that time. They’re extremely unlikely to be permanent.”

“He hasn’t spoken yet,” Emily says, closing her eyes for a second and seeing her husband trying to get up in a flurry of tubes and wires, his eyes on his daughter, and, instead, shuddering into a partial-seizure that seemed to take him by surprise just as much as it had them. Elliott had laughed. For a second.

Then she’d screamed.

_Give him time_ , they all say, but Emily’s never been patient.

“Do you still want to see Daddy?” she asks Elliott after, and Elliott cringes back into Rossi’s arms and says nothing. It feels like a betrayal, but they go home instead.

Neither of them feel strong enough to face their fears quite yet.

 

* * *

 

He’s not… hallucinating. Either that, or he’s had a complete psychotic break because others around him are interacting with Emily. He watches and listens and considers it carefully.

The doctors talk with her about his condition, and he listens to that too. _Lung trauma,_ he asserts, from the non-invasive ventilation mask sealed to his mouth and the agony that’s his throat from a previous intubation, as well as the deep-seated, wet ache in his chest. He’s awake when the nurses change the bandages on his side at some point, studying the wound intensely. He’s seen enough bullet wounds to recognise what it is. He’s awake for an MRI one day, drifting in and out, and he’s awake enough to hear snippets of conversation that float from the control booth.

_Sensorimotor cortices… hyper-intensity…_

_Uh oh,_ he thinks, and wiggles his fingers. They respond, sluggish, and he watches them carefully for the giveaway _twitch_ that comes moments later, working up his arm. _Uh oh._

His vision appears intact. His eyesight is clear. His thoughts are… well, he’s seeing a dead woman, but apparently so is everyone else, so he’s not sure how he feels about that yet. It’s an odd, fractured kind of diagnosis to make, but if he didn’t know better he’d ask, _did I drown?_

Elliott visits, and she cringes away from him. Which is also worrisome but he’s not exactly in the place to do anything about it, because even just lifting his arm leaves him drained and shaking. The tremors worsen when he’s tired, he seizes when exhausted, and he doesn’t want her to see.

He examines her too. The bruise on the crook of her elbow where a IV was set. The careful way Emily lifts her to the bed with one arm behind her back and the other hooked under her legs. _Rib injuries. CPR?_

That’s a horrifying, paralysing thought, but there’s a raw patch of skin along her jaw where a plastic mask rubbed, and he knows what it’s from because he has one just like it. And he’s beginning to suspect that if he drowned, he drowned for a damn good reason.

_Common manifestations of a hypoxic brain injury,_ he lists one night when he’s alone. There’s one in particular… there’s one he’s terrified of.

But he can’t face it yet, so he keeps his mouth firmly closed and doesn’t say a word.

 

* * *

 

Garcia is rambling delightfully about work and her life and Morgan and Kevin when she stops with an abrupt and tentatively gleeful, “Hi, sleeping handsome. How are you?”

Emily looks up from her book to find Spencer studying her with an intent kind of focus he’s either been lacking for the past week or hiding from her. The mask is gone, finally, his mouth ringed by red where it had rubbed against his cheek and his face is stubbly from someone clumsily shaving him. _I should have done that_ , Emily thinks oddly, before her brain kicks into gear and she leans forward to smile reassuringly at him. “Don’t freak out,” she says, reaching for his hand, and his eyes flick to his ring loose around her finger and widen slightly. “I’m real.”

“Real as me,” Garcia says with a laugh, on the edge of her seat and seemingly desperate to inch forward further. “Should I get someone?”

Spencer glances at her, coughs, and stammers out a slurred rush of _sound_. It stops suddenly, as he winces, bringing his hand to his throat, and then his mouth, horrified.

“Oh,” Garcia breathes quietly, and something in Emily that she’d thought was healing since he’d smiled at her sinks as a little lower. “I’ll get… someone.” She vanishes, head turned away from them, and Emily notes with concern a trembling kind of panic working up her husband’s arms.

“Hey,” she says, sharply, leaning over and tapping him on the temple. He jolts and looks at her peculiarly, mouth opening before he seems to think better of it and snaps it shut. “Get out of there. Don’t panic. You’ve been sleeping for almost two weeks, everything is going to be a bit weird, okay? Do…” Her words stumble. “Do you know me?”

He stares at her for a long, frozen moment. Nods. His mouth flickers, he lifts his hand to catch hers and run his fingers around the ring, painfully gentle. When she goes to pull away, a lump in her throat, he clings on with a weak grip, and brings her hand to his heart. Nods again. Closes his eyes. She could pretend not to see the tears but, _fuck,_ they’ve kind of earned them.

“You’re still here,” she breathes, and he nods firmly, his eyes flickering back to her face. “Oh Jesus, you scared the fucking _shit_ out of me, don’t do that ever, ever again, do you—”

She’s not actually sure who leaned into who first, but the kiss is awkward, frantic, and absolutely the best one she’s ever had.

“I love you,” she gasps into the scratchy skin of his jaw, and feels a laugh rumble in his chest. He nods, pressing his cheek to hers, a silent affirmation. “We’re going to be okay.”

Another nod.

They _are_.

 

* * *

 

They’re careful around him, and he hasn’t got the voice to reassure them that he’s okay. Ish. The days grow longer. From snatches of minutes grasped here and there before falling away, to an hour of Emily murmuring endless affirmations of her existence to him, to being able to stand half the morning before crashing. The exhaustion doesn’t fade. His silence is prohibitive.

His hands shake too much to hold a pen, and he’s so disgusted by his childish attempt to write a message to tell Emily how he’s scared he’s going to _really_ wake up to her gone again that he doesn’t try again. She brings him books and, the first time he edges one open and finds that he can still read just as easily as ever, he cries from the raw relief of it.

That’s not usual either. His emotions are loud, clamouring, cluttered. Close to the surface and impossible to pin down. One minute he’s helplessly giddy with love for his wife and daughter, the next he’s so frustrated with his inability to be _himself_ that he pulls away from them both and presses his face into his knees so they can’t see the _anger_ on his features. _Mood swings_ , he thinks glumly, on a downward spiral he’s not overly concerned by, since he’ll be manic again within the next hour. _Personality changes? Am I different, or is this just a reaction to extreme stress?_

It’s impossible to tell. Too many confounds. Too many variables. He can’t ask anyone, because any concession to his broken voice will draw attention to it.

Garcia is a godsend. She falters once, the first day, and then she blazes into his life with a determined positivity that she only increases whenever he lashes out at her. “Shut up, stop scowling at me, eat your jello,” she says, and rams the spoon into his mouth.

Hotch is quiet until the day they’re alone. He brings Jack, who doesn’t even flinch at the sight of Reid in the bed and happily recounts all the new comic books he’s read recently without pausing to breathe unless Hotch gently reminds him. Emily’s not there this day, home with Elliott, and Hotch sends his son out with instructions to bring back something ‘sugary’. Reid watches him, waiting for what’s coming next.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Hotch says finally, nodding, and Reid knows how much he’s not saying in those four simple words. He understands, completely. Stays silent as well as Hotch hands him a file and turns away, letting him choose himself whether he finds out what really happened with Ian Doyle.

He keeps it closed. He knows enough.

Rossi comes in rambling about something unrelated and slips in a hidden, “Glad you’re back, kid. Couldn’t handle losing you,” in between complaining about the hospital coffee and commenting on the attractiveness of Reid’s nurse. Reid knows he doesn’t want a reply to that, so he just smiles and looks down at the blankets to hide the kick of emotion in his heart.

JJ brings Henry. The toddler doesn’t seem bothered by the unfamiliar bed or room or building, just excited that his Uncle Spence is there and completely willing to submit to being snuggled. JJ doesn’t say much, beyond beginning to apologise, and he cuts her off with a shake of his head. He doesn’t want an apology from her keeping Emily alive. Not ever. She doesn’t seem to understand, but Will looks like he does.

Morgan is… quiet. Hurt, deeply. For the first time since his first awkward attempt at communicating, Reid picks up the notepad the nurses have left until he begins to make headway with the Speech Therapist assigned to him.

_I’m not dying,_ he writes carefully. It takes him almost five minutes. _And I’m still me. I promise._

Morgan takes it. Reads it. Smiles. “Yeah, man,” he says. “I know. Just… don’t scare me like that again, okay? I… I don’t know what we’d do without your brain nerding things up around here.”

_Of course._

And Elliott…

He misses Elliott.

 

* * *

 

“No.” Elliott clings to her, pressing right against her chest with her arms hugging around her neck. “Don’t wanna.”

“Want to,” Emily corrects automatically, smiling wanly at a nurse. “Stop this, Ellie. How would Daddy feel if he saw this? He doesn’t get to go home and see you and he misses you—why are you being like this about visiting him?”

Elliott snuffles wetly, leaving a trail of ick on Emily’s shoulder. “Don’t wanna,” she repeats, so Emily crouches, setting her on her feet and frowning at her.

“Explain your reasoning,” she says, channelling Spencer, and Elliott’s eyes well up at the reminder.

Shuffling her feet, Elliott peers up at her through the short bangs curling cockily over her eyes. Emily still hasn’t quite adjusted to the drastically short haircut her daughter now sports but its… growing on her. “Daddy doesn’t talk,” she says finally, biting at her lip. “Is cos he’s mad at me. I wasn’t good.”

Emily pauses. She hasn’t… with everything that’s happening with Spencer and the hospital and…they haven’t talked about _those_ days yet.

They need to.

“When weren’t you good, love?” she asks, aware that people are looking at them strangely, kneeling on the floor of the hospital corridor. Trying to think if she’s been acting oddly since getting her home, the past few weeks a blur of hazy misery and little of clarity.

“When your friend took me,” Elliott says after a long pause, and Emily’s heart skips a beat. “He said I was nasty because I cried and cried and he said Daddy didn’t want me and—” She stops, gulping, finishing with a whimpered, “He was nice otherwise, but.”

Emily wishes she’d killed Doyle slower.

“That’s ridiculous,” she says, biting back the sharp anger that Elliott will misconstrue as being aimed at her. “That man hurt Daddy and took you away—Daddy and I, we came and got you back. Does that sound like we don’t want you?”

Elliott thinks about that for a long moment. “No,” she agrees finally, the misery being replaced with a wide smile. “Would you look for Sergio if he comes back and takes Sergio away?”

Mouth twitching, Emily can only reply with, “Of course,” taking her daughter’s hand and leading her into her father’s room, now the fear has momentarily slipped away. It’ll be back. She hopes Spencer’s having a good day, because then maybe they’ll be able to chase the fear away for good.

He’s not.

Morgan’s there, still awkward around the friend he’d prepared to lose, but pushing through. He stands as they walk in, smiling warmly at Elliott. Spencer is hunched over, his gaze moodily locked on the window and hand tracing broken patterns on the blanket. There are books scattered around him, tossed aside in disgust, and he’s clearly hit the end of his patience with being locked in a bed.

Elliott stops yammering and hides behind her right as Spencer looks up and sees Emily with a cautious half-smile and then looks down and sees Elliott, his face fucking _lighting_ up. He gestures her over, almost bouncing on the spot, and Emily is wary. Morgan is smiling.

They’re planning something. The sneaky shits are planning something.

Scooping Elliott up and ignoring her muffled, _no, Mama,_ Emily plonks her firmly on the bed and scoots her closer to her daddy, ignoring her wide eyes. Spencer holds his hand out pleadingly, relaxing when Elliott accepts it and curls her hand around two of his fingers with a shy smile. He gestures Emily closer, tilting his head back, a clear, _kiss me_ , and she rolls her eyes at him with a sigh and leans closer. He draws back before their lips touch, grinning cheekily.

“Hi, hello,” he rasps.

She bursts into tears. Completely pole-axed, unexpected tears, and Elliott whoops. Spencer laughs hoarsely, devolving into ragged coughs that has Morgan pressing water to his mouth. Through her tears, through the fucking _relief_ that’s sweet and overwhelming all at once, she manages a sobbing, “Was that worth it, you bastard?”

He does nothing but laugh and cough and that’s their turning point.

No more falling, not anymore.

 

* * *

 

He watches the moon drifting across the bedroom window, on his side of the bed that’s been half-empty for far too long. It’s a calm kind of night, peaceful, and he’s… okay.

Exhausted. But okay.

“Hey.” Rolling over, he finds Emily leaning against the doorway, her hair damp from the inevitable ‘post-bathing Elliott’ shower that seems to be a requirement of have a daughter that’s part otter. “You looked pretty gone at dinner, you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, holding his hand out to her, still not over _this_ , and she moves forward to crawl onto the bed, her robe falling open. “Jus… jus… tired.” He winces as the words stumble and trip grossly from his lips, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care, just curls her body flush against him and presses their mouths together. “Elliott wanted to chas… shh.” He closes his eyes, huffing, feeling the trembling stress begin in his hands and work its way up. “Run. Fuck.”

“Stop that,” Emily scolds, taking his hand and pulling it close against her chest. “It’s not going to go away overnight. Speech therapy takes time.”

Time is all he has now. Time to slowly enunciate every word. Time to stammer over a sentence that should take him half a second to verbalize, not a minute. Time to play with his daughter and have to sit down after fifteen minutes because the world begins to tilt and his body begins to tremor and he feels the warning spark beginning in the base of his spine. He’d only pushed that exhaustion once; after coming home from a counselling session with Elliott when she’d finally began to talk about _those_ days. She’d still been shaking, still haunted, and he’d tried to distract her.

He’d managed to get to the kitchen before the seizure had hit, but it was a close thing. He’s still not entirely sure if she saw it. But it was a lesson firmly learned.

“Love you,” he says, the two words he’s managed to practise over and over and over until his clumsy mouth can shape them perfectly.

“Duh,” she responds, kissing him again. Slow and long, and he relaxes into it. The sex that follows is painfully careful, unhurried and steady, and he has to pause three times to catch his breath, but it’s utterly perfect. Both on their sides, arching her back tight against him as he judiciously controls his body enough to slide into her tilted hips from behind, mouthing at the back of her neck. She keeps a shoulder cocked back against his chest to judge his heart-rate, her torso twisted and eyes watching his face carefully for any signs of fatigue. Practicalities they’ve never had to take before, and he feels old and frail, almost, with this new state of things.

A reminder of what he’s lost. What he’s regained. If the tremors and the slurring are the price he pays for this, he’ll pay it seven times over.

He’s thankful for all the time left to him.

 

* * *

 

She’s five today, and as Daddy tells her in his funny skippy kind of talking, that means she’s got ‘responsibilities’ now. Elliott doesn’t think that that sounds like much fun and she tells him so. He just laughs at her, which isn’t a very nice thing to do to her if she’s got responsibilities, but telling him _that_ only makes him laugh harder.

Adults don’t seem to take things like being five very seriously.

She’s not allowed to get up before the sun this morning despite knowing that there’s _presents_ coming, so she stares out the window until there’s a small bit of light meaning it’s _time_.

But—not because she’s five now but because some things _have_ to happen every day, like this and like brushing your teeth and eating dinner—she picks up her book on the way to her parents’ room. Both her parents’ room. She pauses after pushing the door open a little, peering in and making no noise. As quiet as Sergio. They’re still sleeping. Daddy is all curled up tight and close like a ball, Mama with her arms around him.

There’s a feeling that comes with seeing them together, a feeling that makes her happy and sad and confused all at once. It starts in her belly and works its way up to her brain, and she wants to see more and less all at once.

“It’s because you’re happy Mama’s home,” Daddy had told her slowly, when she told him about this feeling, “but you’re also sad that she went away at all. That’s what feelings are like, Ellie. They’re messy.” Elliott doesn’t like messy.

But she likes this.

She creeps closer closer closer, and pushes her nose against Daddy’s. He scrunches his mouth up, _hmmphing_ in his sleep. “Daddy,” she whispers, earning a sleepy-cranky _nuh_ back. “Daddy. Wake up. I’m _five_ now.” He doesn’t. She rolls her eyes. Leans closer. “Daddy!”

“Wake up,” Mama mumbles. “She’s only gonna get louder.”

“Going to,” Elliott corrects her, and when Daddy grumbles something that Elliott can’t quite understand, she follows up with a sighed, “ _Enunciate_ , Daddy.”

“You’ve created a monster,” he says, and says that perfectly. She’s pretty sure he’s _faking_ being asleep. “This is all your fault.”

“You helped,” Mama replies, opening her eyes and looking over at Elliott, her hair all messy and eyes squinted. “Oh my god, it’s not even five a.m. Elliott, _why_.”

“Because I’m five,” she says, _obviously_ , “and because you said I don’t get presents until the sun comes up.”

Now Daddy opens his eyes, glancing to the window. “The sun doesn’t come up for another eighteen minutes,” he says, and Mama makes a soft noise that could be a laugh.

She knows that. “I know that,” she says, grumpily, scrambling onto the bed and accidentally elbowing him in the tummy. He _guh_ s, and rolls backwards away from her bony bits, letting her slide into the warm between the covers he left. “But we gotta read first, so you can practise.” Just like when she was learning to read, except Daddy can read just fine. It’s just his brain gets all cross-wired between his eyes and his mouth and the words come out funny, sometimes. But she’s helping with that. Thrusts the book at him. “Come on,” she coaxes, and he takes the book with hands that shake only a little. “Your turn, then my turn. Quick, because _presents_.”

“You should be flattered,” Mama says, hooking her arm over Daddy’s side and belly and rubbing Elliott’s arm. “She’s prioritizing you over presents. Egocentric stage, my ass.”

“I a-am a high priority,” he replies, flipping the book open. “Okay, El. H-here we go. ‘There is nuh-nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your n-name.’” Elliott smiles at Mama, a secret smile just for them, and settles in to listen. When he reads, he hardly stammers at all.

And she never forgets this one small moment.


	11. Chapter Nine: Alternate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate Chapter Nine:
> 
> Guys. Super Angst. And mostly unedited, because I decided midway THAT THIS ISN'T THE WAY IT COULD END. If you loved how the last chapter ended, JUST READ THAT ONE AND CLICK OUT.

When Elliott was born, her parents fell irrevocably in love with her, and none more so than her father. Emily wasn’t surprised. After all, Spencer Reid had proven over and over again that while his brain was capable of great things, his heart was capable of so much more. And if there was one thing that Spencer threw himself into wholeheartedly and with no regard for his own wellbeing, it was loving others.

Elliott didn’t know any of this at the time and wouldn’t until many years later as she’d flip idly through a yellow-paged scrapbook and pause at her father’s cramped, _Today, Elliott has decided that she doesn’t want to participate. Despite her intentions of being cranky, we’re going to have fun anyway._ Underneath in wonky letters someone had written _Daddy made a Fort for being cross in_. _It has blankets._

Emily, however, had known it instantly and absolutely. She’d known it in the expression on his face when he’d held his infant daughter and she’d known it in the way he delighted in every milestone passed, no matter how small. Most of all, she’d known it in the quiet words shared when he thought he was alone; alone except for the baby in his arms or splayed on the bed next to him with her intent eyes locked on his hands.

_You’re going to be so much more than you know,_ he’d whisper, and Emily would stay quiet by the doorway and consider everything they’d suffered through to get to this point. _And I’m going to be there to see it all._

She never forgets these moments.

 

* * *

 

Elliott fights the nurse and she fights Emily and she’s thoroughly confused as to why they’re getting her out of bed before the sun is even up. She’s tired, cranky, sore, weaned off painkillers just enough that the ache from her bruised ribs makes her breath hitch as they move her to a wheelchair. Kicking her feet makes it hurt more, Grandma isn’t there to cling to, and Elliott looks to Emily for the first time since her death.

“Ow, Mama,” she whispers, hunching into the chair. “It _hurts_.”

There’s something heavy and broken-hearted sinking deep into Emily’s chest. Some vicious kind of scarring that this night has reopened, some seeping wound that she knows is going to burst open and take everything she is with it. It’s held together with the hopeful longing in Elliott’s eyes, as she allows herself the thought that maybe Mama is really back, and the whisper of hope that maybe this isn’t the end of them. Maybe.

She crouches by the chair, bringing her mouth to her baby’s cheek and shaken by how much she’s grown without her. How far Spencer has brought her on his own, despite him never quite believing he’d deserved the honour of a child. “We’re going to see Daddy, okay?” she says, and the words tear that wound just a little more. “He’s…” The nurse looks away. “…he’s very sick and very sleepy, and he’s going to look different than what you’re used to.”

“He’s got a mask?” Elliott asks, glancing back at her bed where the dreaded mask they’d removed from her the day before is still on stand-by. “And lots of needles?”

Emily nods. Swallows. And shuffles forward to cuddle her daughter close, feeling hesitant arms wrap around her neck and the wet, hot breath puffing against her throat. “You understand that hospitals are where the very sick go, don’t you?” she asks, and the pain is leeching up into her face and making everything burn. “And Daddy is… very sick.”

Elliott is silent. She lets go, pulls back, looks away.

She says nothing, and they wheel her from the room.

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was one, her father taught her to read.

But first, he taught her to love. To love the worlds he spun with his voice and his laugh and his giddy delight in the weaving of tales. To love the whisper of a page turning gently. To love the brightly coloured pages in the books that he chose for her, the books that Emily was still floored by. She’d expected, half-expected—because Spencer had never showed any inclination that he was _aware_ that toddlers were confounded by physics—journals and tomes and a bored toddler being lectured about Descartes. Because, she’d forgotten; he loves magic too.

_It’s a tradition, Em,_ he’d murmur, crawling onto whatever surface she was sitting on at the time with their daughter, a book, and a woeful expression. _We need to make traditions._

There was no arguing with him when he was snuggly like this, so she’d let him. Let him plonk Elliott between them, lean the book on her lap, and draw her into a world that was so much more than any she’d ever been offered as a child. Magic and witches and fairy-tales and dragons and a decided lack of _logic_ , and she never admitted to him how much she loved these nights, or how much she missed them when they were gone.

“Dis the cat,” Elliott read slowly, chubby finger tracing the black cat strutting proudly across the page. “The cat is… is what, Daddy?”

“Magic,” Spencer murmured, and he sounded so sure that even Emily was half-convinced.

“ _Magic_ ,” Elliott parroted with a gasp, her own eyes wide.

She never lost that wonder.

 

* * *

 

They’ve removed the mechanical ventilation, and Emily wants to believe that’s a good sign, despite the mask still firmly sealed to his face and the greyish cast to his skin. _Breathing again_ , the doctor assures her, tentatively, but doesn’t meet her eyes when she asks what that means. And Elliott is silent. The room is silent. Silent except for two lonely souls and another that’s failing.

“Can I go up?” Elliott asks suddenly, when the silence is too much to bear, and the nurse looks at Spencer and winces. Emily looks too. “Please, Mama? I’ll be careful. I won’t hurt him or wake him up.”

The nurse nods, stepping forward, and between them they get the girl onto the quiet bed, carefully away from his still-healing side. And Elliott is careful, cautious, inching closer and closer until she can huddle against her daddy and peer at Emily over his sluggishly moving chest like a frightened kitten seeking comfort. A small hand pats his chest, rests over his heart, and she lays close.

“I’ll be outside,” the nurse says, and leaves. Emily waits a moment, an outsider, before realizing Elliott’s waiting for her. It’s a careful risk, but she manages to edge herself into the thin space behind her daughter, resting her own arm over Elliott’s shaking shoulders to splay her hand across the smaller one, both focused on the heart below.

And it hits Emily suddenly, laying like this with her fractured family, that this could be it. The last night, the last morning; the last of something. Like cupping sand between spread fingers, he’s slipping away, his skin cool to the touch and his nails tinted blue. Whatever damage he’d taken in the dark endless waters of the harbour, it was finally catching up, irrevocably turning him away from them.

And she gasps, barely choking it back, because whatever wound she’d imagined in her chest earlier feels realized and fatal; a heart-wrenching grief that tears the noise from her throat and makes her body curl inward, maybe to protect her daughter, maybe to protect herself. Her knee knocks against his legs. He’s silent. She remembers everything all at once and drowns with it.

Another whimper and it’s not hers. Elliott is staring at her, shaking, crying, and doesn’t seem to understand why. Just responding to the wordless grief in her mama behind her. She opens her mouth, tries to say something to her frightened, helpless child but what comes out is a gasping kind of moan that she imagines is very much what it sounds like when a heart is broken.

Instead of anything, she presses her face against her daughter’s back, and tries to hides the tears, fingers gripping tightly to the hand on her husband’s failing heart. She doesn’t know what’s worse: knowing that he’s dying or knowing that she almost wants him to. _You’d rather die than be like this,_ she thinks, and hates herself, and blames herself. _You’d rather be dead than without your mind._

_And knowing that, I still let you drown._

“Daddy told me a story,” Elliott says suddenly, her voice shrill and overloud in her worry. Emily can’t answer. “Can I tell you?” She doesn’t wait, but charges on. “He said it was a yucky day, a grey day…” Emily is frozen, eyes open, heart stopped. “… and he said he loved you.”

“Did he?” Emily whispers, and isn’t sure if she managed the words. Elliott nods. “Did he say anything else?” Another nod.

“He said you were showing him how to get back up.”

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was two, Spencer caught Emily dancing without music in wide, joyous circles around the living room. Elliott shrieked from her arms, arms thrown outward, absolutely sure that her mama would never ever let her go. Laughing and alive and vibrant with the world; this is a moment he never, ever forgets. He joined in without a pause, missing every step. None of them cared, least of all Elliott.

 

* * *

 

Elliott doesn’t want to leave, but it’s daylight now and there are others who need… time. And Emily doesn’t want _it_ to happen, if it’s going to, she doesn’t want her daughter there to commit it to her infallible memory.

Hotch is there when they try to take Elliott away. “No,” she says stubbornly, cringing away from their arms with her little fist bunching in the blanket over her daddy. “I can’t go yet. I can’t go! Mama, I can’t, I can’t, I _can’t_.”

“She needs to be quiet,” someone mutters, a nurse perhaps, and Emily hears someone else snap something sharp to them and is glad she doesn’t have to.

“Elliott, love, please,” she coaxes, tired, strained, ready to snap like brittle plastic left under the sun too long. “Shh, shh, quiet. You’ll…”

“I’ll wake Daddy?” Elliott finishes hopefully, looking thoughtful, and Emily winces. _I wish,_ she almost says, along with, _try it_ , because goddamn, if anything will pull him out of his own head, the sound of his daughter screaming might. But they find out it doesn’t as soon as they lift her down, because she screams and howls and cries until her face is red and breathing ragged, hurting herself more by kicking at them to put her down. Emily can’t hear words in the frantic noise, just misery and terror and desperation and, when she tries to soothe her, Elliott shoots her a hateful look that promises that she knows _exactly_ who to blame for being sent away from the one place she wants to stay.

“Elliott, stop,” says a low voice that cuts through the screams. Elliott jolts, turning horribly pale, looking first at the silent bed, and then at Hotch. “No more.”

Elliott’s lip wobbles, tears spilling, and Emily wants to cover her ears because the silence is worse than the sound, somehow. “But I asked him for a hug,” she says finally, and begins to cry again. Not screaming crying, not a tantrum. Just… helpless tears. “I asked him and he didn’t give me one and I was good, I was good… I don’t _want_ to go.”

“Mamas can hug when Daddies can’t,” Emily says numbly, because she has to at least _try_ to pin herself together, but Elliott shakes her head adamantly.

“Not the same,” is the whispered reply. _Not the same, never the same._

Hotch looks to her for permission, before crouching by the chair. “Your Daddy can’t right now,” he says gently. Emily notes in that moment she’s never seen him like this, in father-mode, except for once. At Haley’s funeral, to a lost little boy. That thought is paralysing. “But your Mama can hug you for him, he won’t mind. Or I can, if you’d prefer. It won’t be the same, but it will help us feel better as well, not just you. Would you like that?”

“Please,” Elliott says, clinging to Hotch’s shirt with her eyes screwed shut and mouth twisted. Pretending. Pretending desperately, and that’s okay, because Emily’s tempted to pretend too. He holds her carefully, his own face turned away from the watching eyes, and she knows there’s a grief there that mirrors hers. They’re all losing something here. There’s a muffled, “Want Mama now, please,” from his chest that would almost draw a smile on any other day, and Emily steps forward once more.

“Stay—” she begins to say to Hotch, right before the weight of the words silences her. She breathes, registers his pain as well, and tries again. “Please stay with him? I’ll be back, I’m coming straight back, just… stay.”

She’s pleading. There’s an unspoken, _don’t let him slip away while I’m not here_ , in her words, and Hotch nods and watches her leave. Emily refuses to look at the bed on the way out because that’s too final, and Elliott’s gaze doesn’t break from it at all under the door swings shut between them.

She whispers it, but Emily hears her anyway; the quiet, _bye Daddy,_ that breaks both their hearts.

 

* * *

 

A touch of a hand on his palm, fingers tracing gently. He tries to turn towards that touch, craves it, but he’s becoming very aware that something is wrong. Everything is wrong. _He’s_ wrong.

_Come on, Spencer,_ someone says, and their voice is deep and almost painful to hear. A pressure on his shoulder, the brush of hair against his cheek. He twitches away from that tickling touch, feels something move with him, on his mouth, his throat. _Don’t make us grieve you. Not when we’ve just gotten her back. Not when you don’t know how much you’ll be missed._

_Aaron,_ Reid thinks suddenly. _Where’s Elliott?_

It hurts. It hurts until it doesn’t. But everything is wrong, and the voice goes away.

_I’m sorry._

_I love—_

 

* * *

 

When Elliott was three, her Mama went away. For a while, her Daddy did too. She didn’t really understand why. Grief was a concept too big, too final, and it hurt too much to imagine for long. But Daddy was sad, sad all the time, and she understood that just fine. Being sad was when nothing was fun and everything was awful. Being sad was when something in your belly and your head got all twisted and angry and made you mean. Elliott got sad sometimes, and Mama always took her to her room, made her sit down quiet on her bed, and not come out until she could explain _why_ she was sad.

Mama always stayed though. On the sad days, the hurting days, Mama always stayed with her on her bed reading a book or just with her eyes closed, until Elliott was ready to not be sad anymore. Sometimes she was sad when Mama wasn’t there, but Daddy took her place.

That was how it had worked, until Mama had went away for good. Then all there were were sad days and not even sitting quiet made them good again.

On this day, Elliott was ready not to be sad anymore. She took her book and she took her cat and she found her Daddy on the living room couch, curled up with his back to the wall and eyes locked on the blank telly. “What are you doing, Ellie?” he asked as she crawled onto the couch next to him and shuffled back.

“Reading a book,” she said, tucking her head against his tummy. “Shh. Listen.” He did. But even when the quiet time was over, she didn’t ask him why he was sad. She just hugged him close and hoped for something more than this.

When Elliott is closer to five than four, her daddy goes away.

She never stops waiting for him to come back.

 

* * *

 

“I have to go stay with Daddy,” Emily explains to the quietly shell-shocked Elliott once she’s safely back in her own bed. Elliott’s eyes skitter around the room, the empty room, and she’ll be alone. “I’m sorry, baby, I’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Okay,” comes the quiet reply, because Elliott is braver than both her parents combined. “Mama?”

Emily pauses midway to brushing her lips against her daughter’s cheek. Does so, feeling the muscles shift as words are formed. “If Daddy dies, we shouldn’t bury him.”

Emily is stunned. Hazel eyes turn to meet her as she straightens, wordless. “Elliott…” she tries, but the little girl who’s not so little anymore, not really, keeps going relentlessly.

“It’s dark underground,” she says, mouth stubborn. “He doesn’t like the dark, and there’s no plugs for a nightlight.” There’s a long pause, before she adds, “There are other options, you know,” and it’s so _Spencer_ that Emily laughs hoarsely just because she realizes he’s not really leaving her.

“I love you,” she says. Elliott opens her mouth, closes it, smiles oddly, and looks straight past Emily to the door.

There’s a noise. The scuff of a shoe.

Emily turns slowly, the world dropping out around her, and Aaron is standing there. Aaron, not Hotch, because he’s pale and shaking and white as a sheet, and Hotch has never looked like this.

“Come quick,” he says, and she falls.

 

* * *

 

It’s a stumble.

A stumble means nothing on a flat surface. A swift and ungainly landing, a laugh, dusty knees. Elliott always gets back up without a care after a fall, if the landing is flat enough.

A stumble means more when there’s a drop. It means more when there’s the opportunity for free fall.  And it means everything when it’s a heart. A stumbling, shallow heartbeat faltering to an end.

Being loved never saved a heart from stopping.

 

* * *

 

_I’m sorry,_ they say, and mean nothing of the kind, because how could they know. _Unexpected_ , but really, haven’t they been waiting for this since he fell from the wharf? Or even before that. Maybe this moment was set in stone the day they let Doyle kill Emily Prentiss. Maybe even before that. Maybe the day she’d said, _yes_. Maybe the day she said, _prove it_.

Maybe she’s always been his end.

He was under the water for a total of six minutes and twenty-three seconds. Emily holds that number and she begins to, macabrely, measure her life by it. In intervals of, _this is the time it takes to lose him_.

His heart stopped for a total of a minute and five seconds. So much less.

And just enough to end him.

They leave her alone with the ventilator working busily to keep the body in the bed alive. The body in the bed, because it had taken one minute and five seconds to finish what the first six minutes had started.

She walks closer in hazy bursts of forgetting herself. Presses her hand to his cool-clammy temple where his brain has finally come to a faltering stop.

And just…

Breaks.

Silently and without moving a muscle on her face, she breaks. Aaron isn’t anywhere near so kind. She’d left him with Elliott. He wasn’t crying, not yet, but the shock made it inevitable. She can’t bear his expression. Even Aaron Hotchner could fail sometimes.

And she feels: broken, nothing, selfish, empty.

“It’s… okay,” she says, because it’s really not but he doesn’t need to know that. There’s a switch holding him here, and she’s the one with her finger on it, and in no world is that an okay thing. “I was… selfish. Wrong. The other day. I said I couldn’t bounce back from this and it occurs to me that if you heard that, you’re probably staying just because you can’t bear to see me hurt. And that’s… I will hurt. For the rest of my life, I’ll hurt for the wanting of you, but I’ll hurt more if you hang on when there’s nothing to hang on to. If you stay like this for us.” She pushes closer, hears a movement at the door, can’t stop now or she’ll never start again. Pressing her cheek as close to his as she can without jarring the mask; his skin is wet and it’s not his tears. “Every time I look at her, I’m going to see you and remember everything you mean to me and everything we sacrificed for this…”

“Emily?” says someone, hoarsely. Morgan.

“I don’t know how to say goodbye,” she says, and he doesn’t respond. “I’m not ready for this.”

“Oh god, no,” Morgan breathes, and she shudders and turns to him. His eyes are red-ringed, swollen. He’s frozen. She feels alone. There’s a tentative moment where she _is_ alone. But Morgan’s never been one to fail completely.

He steps into that ghastly room where Spencer lies, the oldest he’ll ever be, and pulls her close.

And he holds her as their world ends.

* * *

 

Mama doesn’t come and get her again. Uncle Dave does, and Elliott doesn’t make a sound because Uncle Aaron doesn’t look like Uncle Aaron. He looks scared and uncertain and like he’s gonna cry, and that’s nothing that feels right in her life.

Uncle Dave doesn’t look much better.

“Dave, is he…” Uncle Aaron says, standing and holding out his hand, weirdly. Elliott stares and feels sick.

Uncle Aaron just looks at her. “Come on, sweetheart,” he says, touching the wheelchair, and he moves closer and when she wraps her arms around his neck, he shudders horribly and makes a gross kind of noise. And Elliott’s heard that noise before. Daddy had made that noise when they buried Mama.

She clings until she can’t, and prepares to see another box.

 

* * *

 

They bring Elliott. _You don’t need to make a choice yet,_ the doctors say, and Emily wants to believe that. But she knows Spencer. Knows him heart and soul, and he couldn’t bear the idea of this existence.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Elliott asks instantly, perceptive, because the scene looks very much the same except for the fact that Emily is on the bed with Spencer again with her head on his chest and the tears haven’t stopped yet. “Is he sicker?”

They bring her to the bed, let her scramble into the small space between her parents, and leave. They’ll have their time. After. After this.

After the end of them.

“Mama, stop crying,” Elliott says, when an unknown amount of time has passed. “Please. You’re going to scare Daddy…” Her eyes are bruised looking, shadowed. Outside, the moon is falling, one final morning. One final day.

“Go to sleep, love,” Emily whispers, because she’s a coward, and under her palm, there’s still a heart beating weakly despite him being gone. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“It is morning,” Elliott corrects her. She inches up, all elbows and knees and wide eyes like her Daddy’s, and plants an awkward, wet kiss on Spencer’s jaw with a murmured, _night, Daddy, love you_. Emily gets the same moments later. She drifts to sleep on that final, fateful morning, and Emily swears she’ll stop being a coward when she wakes. The machine pumps on, narrating her fears, and in the daytime, this conversation will be easier.

It isn’t.

The moon lands on the horizon and slips from sight.

Emily jolts from a half-formed waking dream of reaching into murky water to a shrill wail of an alarm, Elliott staring at her with stunned, half-asleep eyes. A nurse moves in, mouth thin, the sound stops, but they don’t… they don’t do much else. Emily’s request, before she became a coward.

_Do not resuscitate._

And under her palm, the heart is silent.

“Come on,” Emily says, her mouth moving without her, shuffling off the bed and picking Elliott up, backing away from this moment. This life. This end. Eyes locked on his face. He looks… the same. Alive, really.

He’s not.

“What was that?” Elliott asks, jerking in her arms and grabbing for Spencer’s limp hand before Emily can stop him. Her fingers catch his, curl, cling. For a moment, she clings, and Emily sinks to the ground and takes her daughter with her, wrapping herself around her and staring at his hand hanging there. “What’s going on? Daddy? What’s wrong with Daddy? Why is everyone—” She stops, suddenly, gasps for air, and whimpers, “Daddy can’t die. I want a hug. Daddy, I want a hug, please, please, please, don’t, no… Mama, please.”

But as it turns out, he can.

One last fall.

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
